Kakei ni mo kimi ga tsurara ya musuburan kokorobosoku mo taenu naru kana

筧にも君がつららや結ぶらん
心細くも絶えぬなるかな

Roma-ji: Kakei ni mo kimi ga tsurara ya musuburan kokorobosoku mo taenu naru kana
English Translation: In the water pipe
is it your icy coldness
that has frozen there?
forlorn I am, for it seems
that the flow has ceased to run.
Meaning: Has your coldness frozen into ice even in the water pipe? How forlorn I am, for it seems the flow has stopped.
Commentary: Love Poems 609

Headnote: "When I was staying deep in winter at a village called Sasaki toward Kamo, and Takanobu and others came and composed on the topic 'love at a mountain dwelling'"
The headnote tells us that this was composed when the poet was staying deep in winter at a village called Sasaki near Kamo, and Fujiwara no Takanobu and others visited him and composed on the topic of love at a mountain dwelling. Takanobu was a poet known as a master of portrait painting. At a mountain dwelling water is drawn through a bamboo pipe, but its sound has ceased, perhaps frozen in the cold. The poet imagines that the beloved's coldness has turned to ice and bound the pipe, and sings of the loneliness of a love whose visits and letters have stopped.
After the poems on love expressed through things, a run of poems follows here whose headnotes record the occasion on which they were composed.

First line, “kakei ni mo”: kakei is a pipe of bamboo or wood laid to bring water to a mountain dwelling, answering the mountain dwelling of the topic.
Second line, “kimi ga tsurara ya”: tsurara here is ice, likening the beloved's coldness to it; the binding particle ya answers the attributive ran in the third line.
Third line, “musuburan”: is the ice forming? closing in the attributive form answering ya; the poem breaks after the third line.
Fourth line, “kokorobosoku mo”: lonely and forlorn, the loneliness of the mountain village joined with the anxiety of love.
Fifth line, “taenu naru kana”: naru is the auxiliary of inference from sound: since I no longer hear the pipe, the water seems to have stopped flowing. The ending of love is overlaid.
Author: Saigyō
Source: Sankashu
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