Fuku kaze no iro koso miene Takasago no onoe no matsu ni aki wa kinikeri

English Translation

The wind that blows here
has no colour to be seen
and yet on the pines
high on Takasago's peak
the autumn has come at last

Meaning

The wind that blows has no colour to show; and still, autumn has come to the pines on the height at Takasago.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 290

Headnote: for the place where Takasago was painted on the sliding screens of the Saisho Shitenno-in.
The sixth poem on the autumn wind. A colourless wind brings autumn to a tree that does not change colour. The Saisho Shitenno-in was a chapel built by Retired Emperor Go-Toba, and poems were written for the paintings of famous places on its screens; the hundred and thirty-third poem of Book Two and the hundred and eighty-fourth and two hundred and fifty-ninth of Book Three come from the same undertaking.
Fujiwara no Hideyoshi served Retired Emperor Go-Toba as a guard of the northern quarters, and after the Jokyu disturbance took orders under the name Nyogan. In Book One he is the poet of the twenty-sixth poem.
The time is the beginning of autumn; the place is Takasago in Harima Province, in what is now Takasago in Hyogo, known for its pines.
The occasion was the writing of poems for the screens.

In the first two lines an emphatic particle takes a negative in the concessive form. The construction closes and then runs on, giving a concessive sense: no colour is to be seen, and yet. The fourth and seventieth poems of Book One use the same form.
The third and fourth lines fix place and object. The word for the height means a ridge or summit, used in the hundred and twenty-second and twenty-fourth poems of Book Two.
The poem closes with the same words as the two hundred and eighty-fifth and eighty-ninth, so that three poems share the phrase.
Pine is evergreen and does not change colour, and wind has no colour either. To assert a season that colour cannot disclose is the point of the poem, and marking a season by what cannot be seen is the method of the fourth and seventieth poems of Book One.

Author

Fujiwara no Hideyoshi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other