KKS 54
Text
題しらず
Topic unknown
よみ人しらず
Poet unknown
いはばしる滝なくもがな桜花手折りても来ん見ぬ人のため
|
iwabashiru |
I wish it weren't there |
Notes
- stone-rushing
- This is a pillow word for "waterfall", although the word taki here may represent rapids in a river rather than a true waterfall.
Other sources:
Analysis
This poem and the next one are about bringing cherry blossoms back to the capital, suggesting that the trees there have not yet bloomed. Almost everyone reads the poem the same way: these cherry blossoms are on the other side of a dangerous river, and the poet wishes that the river weren't there so that he could take some of the blossoms and bring them back to those in the capital who weren't able to come with him. Kaneko(1927) is the only one to adopt a reading found in Keichū's Kokin yozaishō although Keichū himself strongly rejects it: both the waterfall and cherry blossoms are beautiful, but since only the blossoms can be carried home, it would be better if the waterfall weren't there at all.
Shunzei praised the use of words in the poem, and both Takeoka and the Shinzenshū noted the older style features of the poem: the pillow word, the call to nature, and the division of the poem into two 5-7 pairs around the central line of the cherry blossoms.
This poem appears in both the Yakamochi Collection and the Sarumaru Collection, both collections that include a number of anonymous poems that probably are not by the poets themselves (see KKS 29 for the Sarumaru Collection.) In the Sarumaru version, the prose preface says that he sees flowers actually in the stream itself. This reading is adopted by a minority of pre-modern scholars, possibly based on this collection.
