KKS 25

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Text

「歌たてまつれ」とおほせられし時、詠みてたてまつる

When [the Emperor] said "Submit a poem," [Tsurayuki] read this and submitted it.

貫之

Ki no Tsurayuki

我せこが衣春雨降るごとに野辺の緑ぞ色まさりける

waga seko ga koromo harusame furu goto ni nobe no midori zo iro masari-keru

My husband's clothes Stretched for washing: the spring rain Every time it falls The green color of the fields Grows a shade deeper.

Notes

(See poem 22 for notes on the prose preface, which is the same)

My husband

Because the poet is a man, a number of early commentators tried to interpret seko as "wife". This idea proved untenable, but there were other attempts to deal with the difficulty: Takanao (Shinshaku) thought it was a miscopying of wagimoko (my wife), while Tō no Tsuneyori interpreted as purely a poetic preface without meaning for the poem as a whole. All modern scholars take the view of Mabuchi; that Tsurayuki is simply writing in the voice of a woman.

Stretched for washing

the spring rain

This is a preface ending in a pivot word: haru means both "stretch (clothes)" and "rain."

Other sources:

• Kokin waka rokujō | Shinsen waka
• Shūka daitai | Teika hachidaishō

Analysis

There is a close connection between this poem and the previous one; both take us deeper into spring as the leaves of the trees become greener, this time due to the spring rain.

The main interpretive question for this poem is the role of the first two lines. As mentioned above, they are clearly a preface, but how does the preface relate to the rest of the poem? The most common interpretation among modern scholars is that there is no deep meaning to the preface, but it simply evokes a scene of a woman washing clothes in a country house, looking out at the greenery of spring. This is the reading of Kubota(1937), Matsuda(1968), and Katagiri. Takeoka also generally takes this opinion but questions whether the clothing somehow relates to the "green" of the final line.

Takeoka's speculation is grounded in readings beginning with the Jidenkai}}, who continued to read this section as a reflection of Tsurayuki's frustrated political hopes. In this reading, the "green" is the green of the 6th rank robes. Kaneko(1927) points to Tales of Ise 41 which also involves clothes washing and a green robe representing a low rank. He considers this poem to be directly based on the Ise story but few other scholars take it this strongly. Miura(1943), like Kaneko, rejects the idea that this is reflecting Tsurayuki's failed political hopes but still reads this as the wife of a low ranking man, adding to the sadness of the scene. On the other hand, Matsuda and Katagiri both think the mood is positive, with a sunny image of the clothes washing. Katagiri wonders if this could be a screen painting poem, and perhaps this is closest to capturing the true mood of the poem.

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