KKS 17
Text
[題しらず]
[Topic unknown]
[よみ人しらず]
[Poet unknown]
春日野はけふはなやきそ若草のつまもこもれり我もこもれり
|
kasuga wa |
The fields of Kasuga |
Notes
- Like young shoots
- wakakusa no is working like a pillow word here, connecting to the scene of the poem but also adding the idea of freshness and youth. The word tsuma can act as both "wife" and "husband" in older Japanese.
Other sources:
Analysis
Mabuchi(18th c.) gives the reading that is the standard one today: the farmers are going to burn the fields to fertilize the ground, but the poet wants them to wait so that he and his lover can enjoy the field first. Mabuchi notes the old style of the poem and calls it soft and elegant. Other commentators agree that this is an old-style poem, with Kaneko(1927) noting the repetition of the last two lines: an uncommon technique in later Heian court poetry. Kubota(1937) also cites the breaks at the end of the 2nd and 4th lines as representative of older-style folk song poetry.
According to Matsuda(1968), the KKS compilers included the poem here because the burning fields sets the stage for the growing plant shoots in the next block of poems. Originally this was probably a simple folk song, but the Heian poets may have chosen it for its suggestion of the aristocratic practice of picking young shoots at the beginning of spring. There is also a certain similarity between all five anonymous poems from 16-20, which all feel like rustic, simple folk poems. Some older commentaries like Seigi(Kagawa) read this as a Nara court poem, but the folk reading seems more likely.
