KKS 11
Text
春の始めの歌
A poem on the start of spring
壬生忠岑
春きぬと人はいへども鶯の鳴かぬかぎりはあらじとぞ思ふ
|
haru ki-nu to |
"Spring has come" |
Notes
Other sources:
Analysis
Fujiwara no Kintō included this in his ninefold division of waka quality, in the exact middle (中品中), described as "Not having any excellent points, or any bad points, but simply how things are." Katagiri's explanation for this is that the poem has no expression of feeling but simply expresses the poet's opinion in natural language. If the araji of the last line is a spoken vernacular usage as Takeoka suggests, perhaps that also prevented this poem from being seen as the height of excellence.
This poem continues from poem 10 in expressing spring imagery through its absence. The Eigashō first picked up on this, assigning it the same adjective hakanashi that Kenshō and others applied to poem 10. Other commentaries agree -- whereas poem 10 was asking the warbler about spring, this is about spring coming on the calendar. The poet refuses to believe that it's actually spring as long as the warbler is not there. Kubota(1937) calls this an "elegant joke" with a play on the different meanings of "spring".
Takeoka likens the poem to a small drama, noting the parallelism of the two halves, and the use of subject-predicate pairs (giving the poem a prose-like feel). Both he and Katagiri quote a poem from Bǎi Jūyì:
先遣和風報消息 続教啼鳥説来由
First the wind comes bringing tidings, then the birds cry saying that spring has come.
Some manuscripts of the Tadamine Collection say that this poem was read in 905 for a screen painting at a celebration of the 40th birthday of Fujiwara no Sadakuni (the one that was the setting for the series of celebratory poems beginning at KKS 357. Since Tadamine was himself one of the compilers of the KKS, he presumably would have remembered the circumstance of his own composition. The setting of the poem given in the Tadamine Collection may be wrong given that these poetry collections of early Heian poets were usually not compiled by the poets themselves. However, Katagiri offers an alternate explanation: to better fit this into the KKS sequence as a response to poem 10, the original circumstance of the composition was intentionally suppressed.
