夕暮はいづれの雲の名残とて
花橘に風の吹くらん
花橘に風の吹くらん
- Roma-ji
-
Yūgure wa izure no kumo no nagori tote hanatachibana ni kaze no fukuramu
- English Translation
-
At evening, of which
cloud is it the remnant, then
the wind that comes now
and blows across the flowers
of the orange, I wonder
- Meaning
- At evening, of which cloud is it the remnant, this wind that blows across the orange blossom?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 247
Headnote: from the fifty poems set by Cloistered Prince Shukaku.
This poem closes the run on orange blossom, asking where the wind that carries the scent has come from. The headnote assigns it to a set of fifty poems commissioned by Cloistered Prince Shukaku, a son of Emperor Go-Shirakawa and abbot of Ninna-ji; the thirty-eighth and fortieth poems of Book One come from the same set.
This is Teika's third appearance in this book, after the two hundred and thirty-second and two hundred and thirty-fifth poems.
The time is an evening in the orange season; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The first line gives the hour. Michitomo's two hundred and thirty-ninth poem also set the orange in an evening wind, and the two share the time of day.
The second line means: of which cloud. Using a word of selection rather than a simple interrogative makes the question one among alternatives.
The word in the third line means what is left behind, an afterglow, used in the hundred and forty-fifth poem of Book Two; the particle after it is quotative.
The fourth line names the flower.
The auxiliary at the close expresses present conjecture. The wind blows as the remnant of some cloud, and that wind carries the scent. The previous poem asked how a young tree could hold an old scent; this one asks where the wind came from. Neither question can be answered, and to trace the scent to its source and fail is a fitting close for the run.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Teika
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Where the orange gives its fragrance, if I doze there even in my dream there is the scent of the sleeves of one I knew long ago
- Only from this year has it begun to flower this orange, and how does it give the fragrance of the days that are long gone by
- The cuckoo cannot tell the fifth month from the sixth and hesitating between them, its voice is heard somewhere up there in the sky
- The garden's surface has come to be a place where no moonlight gets through for the summer shade grows thick and thicker in the branches