KKS 19
One of Teika's manuscripts has 18 and 19 in the opposite order, and a few modern editions follow this ordering.
Text
[題しらず]
[Topic unknown]
[よみ人しらず]
[Poet unknown]
み山には松の雪だに消えなくに都は野辺の若菜積みけり
|
miyama ni wa |
In the deep mountains |
Notes
- Even the snow on the pines
- Various explanations have been offered for why the poet says that "even" the snow in the pines has not vanished -- clearly this means that the snow on pines is expected to vanish first, but is it simply that the needles are small and don't hold much snow? I think it may just be that pine trees are being used for the scenery the poet sees, and that he simply means the snow on the trees melts quicker than the snow on the ground.
Other sources:
Analysis
The theme of picking young shoots continues to develop -- here the shoots are actually being picked, but far away from what seems to be the main focus of the poem.
The biggest interpretive question is who the poet is and where they are reading the poem. Teika and Tō no Tsuneyori felt that this poem was by someone from the capital, gazing out at the far off pine trees which still had snow. Miura(1943) agrees based on the sequence of poems.
Kagawa (Seigi) disagrees, saying that this is being read from a mountain village. Miura thought that the feeling of the poem (rather than the sequence in the KKS) supported this view, and Takeoka and Katagiri both agree as well. But the older commenters seemed to think that the poet was looking down on the fields from the village and seeing the shoots being picked. Takeoka and Katagiri, with perhaps too literal a view, didn't think this could be seen from the mountain. Takeoka thought the villager was receiving a gift of shoots from the capital, while Katagiri said the villager was coming down to the capital for some purpose and sees the shoots being picked.
Kaneko(1927) is an outlier; he thinks that the logistical difficulties with the poem make it more likely this is a screen painting. Katagiri thought that this poem from the "anonymous poet era" was too old to be a screen painting.
I think there are strengths and weaknesses to each of these approaches. I don't know if the poets had such a literal view of the poetry that they were considering whether the fields could actually be seen from the village, or whether there was enough time for the shoots to be delivered. I also don't know if they required a specific hypothetical person in a specific place -- Katagiri seems to agree with this in some of his commentary on other poems, but here he takes a particularly literal view of the situation.
Fujiwara no Kintō, in the Shinsen zuinō, identified a potential poetic fault in this poem, in that the first and fourth lines begin with the same sounds (miya). He noted that this is not truly a fault because miyama (deep mountains) and miyako (capital) are different words. Later commenters noted this potential fault as well, although some of them disagreed that this wasn't a fault -- only that because of the antiquity of this poem the fault is excusable. Takeoka felt that this repetition of sounds was actually a strength of the poem, emphasizing the contrast between the poem's two parts.
