常磐なる吉備の中山おしなべて
千歳をまつの深き色かな
千歳をまつの深き色かな
- Roma-ji
-
Tokiwa naru Kibi no Nakayama oshinabete chitose o matsu no fukaki iro kana
- English Translation
-
Ever green and firm,
Kibi's Middle Mountain stands,
covered all alike—
awaiting a thousand years, pines
of such a deep, deep color.
- Meaning
- Evergreen and unchanging, Kibi's Middle Mountain is covered all alike in the deep color of pines that await a thousand years.
- Commentary
-
Book Seven Felicitation Poems 747
Headnote: "Nakayama in Bitchū Province, the Suki province, for the Great Thanksgiving Festival in the reign of Tenryaku."
This is the first poem of the sequence of Great Thanksgiving Festival poems. The evergreen Middle Mountain of Kibi is all alike the deep color of pines awaiting a thousand years. According to the headnote, it was composed on Nakayama in Bitchū Province, chosen as the Suki province for the Great Thanksgiving Festival in the Tenryaku reign.
The name of the author is not known.
The scene is the Great Thanksgiving Festival in the Tenryaku reign, and the place is Kibi's Middle Mountain in Bitchū Province.
The direct occasion is the composition on a place name of Bitchū Province, designated as the Suki province for the Great Thanksgiving Festival of Emperor Murakami in the Tenryaku reign.
For the Great Thanksgiving Festival, two provinces were chosen by divination to offer new grain, Yuki in the east and Suki in the west, and poems on place names of those provinces were presented. Kibi's Middle Mountain is a poetic place in Bitchū Province, a mountain in present-day Okayama City. Book Twenty of the Kokin wakashū also contains "Makane fuku Kibi no Nakayama obi ni seru hosotanigawa no oto no sayakesa."
The first line, "tokiwa naru," means "evergreen and unchanging." 731 in this book begins with the same first line and also sings of evergreen pines.
The second line, "Kibi no Nakayama," is a poetic place in Bitchū, the Suki province. As a Great Thanksgiving Festival poem, it names a famous site of the province.
The third line, "oshinabete," means "all alike, everywhere." It is the same word as the first line of 735 in this book; there the uniform pale green of the trees was contrasted with the thousand-year color of the pine, while here the whole mountain is uniformly the deep color of pines.
In the fourth line, "chitose o matsu no," "matsu" is a pivot word meaning both to await a thousand years and pine. It is the same pivot word as "yorozuyo o Matsu no Oyama" in 726 in this book.
The last line, "fukaki iro kana," means "what a deep color," closing with the exclamatory "kana." Setting "deep color" against "pale green" in 735 in this book, the contrast of pale and deep presents the green of thousand-year pines. From here to the end of the book, poems of the Great Thanksgiving Festival follow, and the book of felicitations closes with celebrations of enthronement.
- Author
- Unknown Poet
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Eight hundred days' walk, the fine sand along that beach, for my lord's long reign count it as the number of years, O guardian of the offshore isle.
- Mount Kasuga stands to the south of the capital, and so it thinks, like its deer: that the wisteria of the north may meet with its springtime.
- Where the red dawn glows, in the village of Asahi, the sun-shade moss grows— for the Feast of Abundant Light it surely will be the garland.
- Our sovereign lord forever firm as the rock at Moruyama guarding— mountain folk, so it would seem: they wear the mountain vines.