帰り来ぬ昔を今と思ひ寝の
夢の枕に匂ふ橘
夢の枕に匂ふ橘
- Roma-ji
-
Kaerikonu mukashi o ima to omoine no yume no makura ni niou tachibana
- English Translation
-
The past will not come
again, and I take it for
now, and fall asleep
and at my dreaming pillow
the orange gives its fragrance
- Meaning
- Taking for the present a past that will not come again, I fell asleep; and at the pillow of my dream the orange is in scent.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 240
Headnote: a summer poem, from the time when she presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The third poem on orange blossom. The two before it looked forward; this one turns back. In sleep the past becomes the present, and the orange is fragrant there. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her third appearance in this book, after the hundred and eighty-second and two hundred and fifteenth poems.
The time is a night in the orange season; the place is a bedchamber.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line means that it will not come back, so that the irrecoverability of the past is granted at the outset.
The second line takes the past for the present, and the distance between them is abolished inside the mind.
The word in the third line means falling asleep while still holding a thought, on the assumption that what is dwelt on will appear in dreams.
The fourth line means at the pillow where the dream is happening. As in Teika's thirty-eighth poem in Book One, on the floating bridge of a spring night's dream, and in the daughter of Shunzei's hundred and twelfth in Book Two, where a dream and a scent meet at a pillow, dreaming and fragrance are joined.
The poem closes on a noun. What happens in the dream and what is actually in the air are left undistinguished. The scent reaches the sleeper too, and whether the scent called up the dream or the dream the scent cannot be decided.
- Author
- Princess Shokushi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Who will there be then to remember, at the scent of orange blossom once I too have come to be one of the people of old
- Who is to recall it in the days to come, then that in the evening wind it made its promise, this orange tree beside my house
- Where the orange sheds its flowers, under the eaves the remembering fern hangs, and, calling the past the dew comes spilling over
- In the dark of May in a light sleep taken through the short summer night the orange blossom's fragrance lies cool upon my sleeve here