KKS 2

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Text

春たちける日よめる

Read on the first day of spring

紀貫之

Ki no Tsurayuki

袖ひちてむすびし水の氷こほれるを春たつ今日の風や溶くらん

sode hichi-te musubi-shi mizu no koore-ru wo haru tatsu kyō no kaze ya toku-ran

The water that I once scooped, drenching my sleeves, Has frozen to ice Will the blowing wind melt it On this day, the start of spring?

Notes

This poem is a single sentence that is essentially an object-subject-verb construction. The first three lines modify the "ice" which then the "wind" will "melt".

Scoop, spring, start, melt

All four of these words have potential secondary meanings as engo with "sleeves." musubu: "weave" and "scoop", haru: "stretch [cloth]" and "spring", tatsu: "cut [cloth]" and "start [of a season]", and toku "separate" and "melt".

Will the blowing wind melt it

The idea of spring wind melting the ice of winter seems to derive from the Classic of Rites] (礼記). In the 月令 chapter, which discusses the various seasons, it says that in the first month, "The east wind melts the ice" (東風解凍). This idea was also found in a number of Chinese poems that built off the concept.

Other sources:

• Shinsen waka | Kokin waka rokujō | Wakan rōeishū
• Korai fūteishō

Analysis

This poem has been consistently praised since the early days of poetry commentary:

• Fujiwara no Toshiyori (Toshiyori Zuinō) used it as an example of a poem with both a good feeling (kokoro) and good words to express the feeling.
• Shunzei (Korai fūteishō) echoed this judgment, saying that for a KKS poem it had good feeling and words.
• Sōgi praised it as a perfect poem for the beginning of spring, and suggested it worked better as the first poem of the collection (where Tsurayuki himself placed it in his Shinsen waka).
• Kamo no Mabuchi praised the poem as having a strong tone and lingering feeling (yojō), as well as an old poetic style.

This poem contains the first actual spring imagery of the collection, although we are still in the remnants of winter. Kubota(1937) points out that the reference to spring is in fact to the spring that is not quite here yet, despite the calendar. This may suggest a connection to the first poem -- even though the canonical Chinese texts claim the spring wind will melt the ice, that's not actually going to happen on this cold day despite it technically being the start of spring. Miura(1943) agrees, saying that the focus on the water connects to the life of spring, and he imagines the poet sitting inside thinking of the Chinese texts, wondering when that will be reflected in life.

Part of the skill of this poem comes in the use of three seasons in sequence -- the summer when the water was scooped, the winter when it froze to ice, and the spring wind at the end. Some earlier commentaries had also tried to work autumn into the poem (or even the love and miscellaneous volumes of the KKS), but this is a minority position.

What is this "water" the poet scooped? Kubota sees this poem as evoking the summer gatherings in mountain areas, where the Heian elite would go to escape the severe heat of the summer. Katagiri(1998) offers a different reading -- the bustle of a mountain well in the summer with travelers fighting to get some (and thus wetting their sleeves). This contrasts with the stillness and isolation of winter. This is similar to Takeoka's(1976) effusive praise of the poem -- he notes the "movement" of the water, then the freezing ice, then the movement once again of the wind. According to Takeoka, the wo particle at the end of the third line reflects the freezing in the way it stops the flow of the sentence as well.

Accompanying all of this is the dense use of engo connected to "sleeves", which overlays a technical skill on what is already an evocative poem. McCullough says that these "enrich the texture of what is already an exemplary court-style waka" (410-411). She also says that this poem was "placed precisely where it showed to best advantage, between the shallow wit of [poem 1] and the simple, songlike, anonymous [poem 3]" (426-7).

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