Kaku shite zo hito wa shinu to iu fujinami no tada hitome nomi mishi hito yue ni

かくしてぞ人は死ぬといふ藤波の
ただ一目のみ見し人ゆゑに

Roma-ji: Kaku shite zo hito wa shinu to iu fujinami no tada hitome nomi mishi hito yue ni
English Translation: It's like this, they say,
that people die of love;
like wisteria waves,
for one I glimpsed but once,
only once, and that was all
Meaning: This, they say, is how people die of love: for someone I glimpsed only once, like wisteria blossoms swaying in waves.
Commentary: Book Twelve Expressing Thoughts through Things 3075

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Expressing Thoughts through Things"
Suffering nearly to death for someone seen only once, the poet realizes this is what it means to die of love. The beauty of swaying wisteria clusters conveys the vividness of that single glimpse.
The poet is unknown. Book Twelve, titled the second part of "Love Poems Exchanged Old and New," gathers love poems by people whose names have not come down to us, arranged by category.

Line one, "kaku shite zo," means "like this," with "zo" concluded by the attributive "iu" in line two.
Line two, "hito wa shinu to iu," means "they say people die," a hypermetric line of eight syllables, and the poem pauses here.
Line three, "fujinami no," means "of wisteria waves," the clusters swaying like waves, leading through their eye-catching beauty to "hitome mishi."
Line four, "tada hitome nomi," means "only a single glance."
Line five, "mishi hito yue ni," means "for the one I saw," a phrase also found in poem 3003 in this book.
Author: Unknown
Source: Manyoshu
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