KKS 41
Text
春の夜、梅の花をよめる
Read on plum flowers on a spring night.
春の夜の闇はあやなし梅の花色こそ見えね香やは隠るる
|
haru no yo no |
The spring night’s |
Notes
- Ineffective
- The range of meaning of ayanashi is difficult to capture and various editions and commentaries differ on its exact meaning here. The two most common suggestions are "useless" (that is, useless at hiding the plum flowers) or "incomprehensible" (that is, it’s incomprehensible why the darkness tries to hide the flowers). Most editions go with one of these two – Takeoka seems to be the only one to apply both meanings to the poem.
Other sources:
Analysis
This is another poem on plum blossoms at night. The structure of this one is similar to the previous, with the "plum flowers" line hanging in the middle of the poem. This poem also relies on a personification (in this case, of the darkness), coupled with a number of rhetorical features that make the poem sound like direct, common speech. While the theme of "flower scent at night" was well known from Chinese poetry, the Shinzenshū edition notes that the second line in particular shows Mitsune’s attempt at a fresh take on the theme.
Kubota(1937) suggested reading this with a love subtext – the woman being "hidden" but the man not wanting to give up. Takeoka similarly sees this as the woman trying to hide herself but still leaving a sleeve shown to entice the man. Katagiri rejected these ideas since the poem is in the spring section. This raises a question with an unclear answer –- while the poem may have had such a subtext in its original context, should we make sure to ignore such possibilities when we are reading it in the context of the KKS? Or did the compilers still intend for readers to savor such secondary meanings?
