KKS 35
Text
[題しらず]
[Topic unknown]
[よみ人しらず]
[Poet unknown]
梅の花たちよるばかりありしより人のとがむる香にぞしみける
|
mume no hana |
The plum blossoms |
Notes
- people
- hito can be singular or plural here, depending on your reading of the overall poem.
Analysis
Again this poem seems to invite a love context. It can be read as a general poem that "people" in general are blaming the man, perhaps as a joke, for getting the scent. However, Kubota(1937) thinks the "person" is a wife and that the poem would have been perceived as a humorous use of the love context, and other commentators seem to agree.
This poem appears in the poetry collection of Fujiwara no Kanesuke with a preface that varies in details based on the manuscript, but gives the poem an explicit love context. In that sense togamuru would presumably refer to a woman blaming or being jealous with Kanesuke for visiting someone else and getting the plum scent from her robes. Kitamura Kigin (Kyotanshō) quotes Matsunaga Teitoku saying that the compilers of the KKS omitted the prose preface so this would be read as a spring rather than a love poem. Mabuchi saw the Kanesuke attribution as mistaken, while Katagiri thought that Kanesuke borrowed this poem for use in one of his own poems. Another possibility is that the compilers of the KKS suppressed the context to avoid including a love affair poem from someone who was still living and active at the time of the compilation.
The poetry collections ascribed to many of these early poets from the KKS era and before were generally not collected by the poets themselves. There are a good number of poems that appear in the collections of multiple poets, or "poet unknown" poems from the Imperial collections that are in the collections of named individuals. There is probably no single explanation that serves to explain all of these circumstances.
