Aware nari waga mi no hate ya asamidori tsui ni wa nobe no kasumi to omoeba

English Translation

How sorrowful it is—
the end that awaits my life:
pale green in the haze,
at last upon the meadow
I shall become that mist.

Meaning

How sorrowful it is, the end that awaits me—when I think that at last I shall become the pale green haze that trails across the meadow.

Commentary

Book Eight Lament Poems 758

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Topic unknown."
This is the second poem of the sequence on impermanence. It laments that one's own end will be, at last, to become the pale green haze trailing over the meadow. As with the preceding poem, the headnote gives no topic, and the circumstances of composition are not recorded.
The author was a poet of the early Heian period, one of the Six Poetic Immortals and one of the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals.
The scene is spring, when haze trails across the land, set on an open meadow.
The direct occasion is not recorded.
The poem appears in her personal collection, the Komachishū.

The first line, "aware nari," states the lament outright, with a pause after the first line. What is sorrowful is revealed only in the lines that follow.
In the second line, "waga mi no hate ya," "hate" is the end of life. "Ya" is exclamatory, fixing the lament upon the poet's own end.
The third line, "asamidori," names the pale green of the haze. It modifies "the haze of the meadow" in the fourth and last lines, adding the faint color of a spring field.
In the fourth line, "tsui ni wa nobe no," "tsui ni wa" means "in the end." "Nobe," the meadow, evokes the open field used for cremation.
The last line, "kasumi to omoeba," captures cremation smoke blending into the spring haze as one's own body turning into haze. "Omoeba," a conditional form with "ba," gives the reason and circles back to "aware nari" in the first line in an inverted structure. Where the preceding poem looked broadly at the order of human deaths through dew and drops, this poem turns to the end of one's own single life. In 766 and 767 of this book as well, haze is sung together with the smoke that sends off the dead.

Author

Ono no Komachi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other