KKS 2
Text
春たちける日よめる
Read on the first day of spring
紀貫之
袖ひちてむすびし水の氷れるを春たつ今日の風や溶くらん
|
sode hichi-te |
The water that |
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, spring
- 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".
Other sources:
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.
The idea of spring wind melting ice may 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 may seem like a tenuous link although it appears in scholarship from the 12th century up to the present. In the Wakan roeishu, the 立春 section includes three Japanese poems, including this one, as well as some lines of Chinese verse. One of the lines is 池凍東頭風度解 "The east wind passes across the frozen lake and melts it", showing that poets soon after Tsurayuki recognized the reference.
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. A few Edo-period commentaries disputed this idea and claimed the water was being scooped on the first of spring. Some earlier commentaries had also tried to work autumn into the poem as well, but this is a minority position. One commentary (Template:Denju) even tried to also label sode as "miscellaneous" and tokuramu as "love", thus working the six major divisions of poetry into the single poem. This shows the stature that this poem achieved in the late Heian period.
Template:Modern points out that the reference to spring is in fact to the spring that is not quite here yet, despite the calendar. This echoes Template:Modern, and 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. Template:Modern 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.
What is this "water"? 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 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 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 を particle at the end of the first lines 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 袖, 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).
