白山に年ふる雪や積もるらん
夜半に片敷く袂冴ゆなり
夜半に片敷く袂冴ゆなり
- Roma-ji
-
Shirayama ni toshi furu yuki ya tsumoruran yowa ni katashiku tamoto sayu nari
- English Translation
-
Upon White Mountain
is the snow of years gone by
piling up again?
The sleeve I spread alone at midnight
has turned so bitterly cold
- Meaning
- On White Mountain, is the snow that has fallen year after year piling up once more? At midnight the single sleeve I spread to sleep on has grown bitterly cold.
- Commentary
-
Book Six Winter Poems 666
Headnote: "Topic unknown."
This is the tenth poem of the snow sequence. Feeling the chill of the single sleeve spread for sleeping alone at midnight, the speaker wonders whether the snow that has fallen year after year is piling up on distant White Mountain. The headnote gives no topic, and the circumstances of composition are not recorded.
The author, "Former Major Counselor Kintō," is Fujiwara no Kintō. A son of the Regent Fujiwara no Yoritada, he rose to Provisional Major Counselor. Versed in poetry and music, he compiled the Wakan Rōeishū.
The scene is midnight in winter, and the place is the bedchamber of one who sleeps alone.
The direct occasion is not recorded.
The first line, "shirayama ni," means "on White Mountain," a poetic place in Kaga Province rising on the borders of Kaga, Echizen, and neighboring provinces. It was sung as a mountain of deep snow.
In the second line, "toshi furu yuki ya," "furu" carries both years "passing" and snow "falling." "Ya" is an interrogative particle corresponding to "ran" in the third line.
The third line, "tsumoruran," means "is it piling up?" with "ran" as an auxiliary of present conjecture about something out of sight. The poem breaks after the third line.
The fourth line, "yowa ni katashiku," means "spreading one sleeve to sleep alone at midnight."
The last line, "tamoto sayu nari," means "my sleeve has grown so cold," with "nari" as an inferential auxiliary. Taking the coldness of the sleeve close at hand as grounds, the poem infers snow piling up on faraway White Mountain; like 657 in this book, which inferred the cold of light snow on distant peaks from the color of reeds on a plain, it is a poem that knows distant snow from something near. From the exchanges on snowy mornings before, it moves to snow on a midnight of sleeping alone.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kintō
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Today, I thought, perhaps even you might come to call, and so I gazed out— yet not a footprint marks the snow within my garden
- Only now I hear it— the heart leaves no footprints after all; though through the snow I pushed my way, sending my thoughts to you
- Before the day has dawned upon my bed where I lie waking there comes a sound— the bamboo by the fence snapping beneath the snow
- On Mount Otowa the white snow shows so clearly that the cock mistakes it, crying out that dawn has come— ah, the voice of the bird!