Ame sosoku hanatachibana ni kaze sugite yamahototogisu kumo ni naku nari

English Translation

Rain is pouring on
the flowering orange tree
and the wind goes through
and the mountain cuckoo cries
somewhere up among the clouds

Meaning

Rain pours on the orange blossom, the wind passes through it, and the mountain cuckoo seems to be calling somewhere in the clouds.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 202

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, a poem on the cuckoo.
From the same hundred-poem sequence as the poem before. The original gives neither a fresh headnote nor a fresh attribution, which indicates the same poet. Where that poem refused the voice, this one sets rain, wind and cry side by side as a scene.
The poet is Fujiwara no Shunzei, as in the previous poem.
The time is a summer night; the place is where orange trees are in flower.
The occasion was the set topic of the cuckoo.
Orange blossom was long written of as a scent that brings the past to mind.

The verb in the first line means to pour down upon, the word used of water over rock in Prince Shiki's thirty-second poem in Book One.
The second line names the flower. Orange blossom was held to call up the past through its scent, and answers to the thoughts of the past in the previous poem, so that the two are joined by the subject of memory.
The third line has the wind passing through. Rain, flower and wind are stacked, and the conditions for the scent to rise are complete.
The fourth line names the bird in the same words that closed the previous poem, so that the two share a phrase.
The auxiliary at the close marks inference from sound. After the two hundredth poem, which put the bird in the shade of the moon's katsura, it is placed here in the clouds, beyond reach. Rain, flower and wind are on the ground, and the bird alone is in the sky.

Author

Fujiwara no Shunzei

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other