KKS 6

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Text

雪の木に降りかかれるをよめる

素性法師

春たてば花とや見らむ白雪のかかれる枝に鶯の鳴く

Translation

Read on snow fallen on the branches of a tree.

Priest Sosei

Since spring has come / it may look like flowers. / On a branch covered (4) / With white snow (3) / A warbler is crying.

Explanation

The previous two poems involved warblers and snow, but here the warbler is crying the full voiced cry of spring. The snow now looks like flowers to the poet, and thus probably to the warbler as well. Feigned confusion between snow and plum flowers, called mitate, is common in the KKS as well as in Chinese poetry, and the MY.

Detailed Notes

をよめる

According to Katagiri, the use of をよめる rather than を見て(よめる) means that this was a poem topic (perhaps artificially assigned or chosen) rather than an actual sight. A few manuscripts do read をみてよめる instead.

見らむ

The らむ suffix here means the poet is guessing that the warbler has mistaken the snow for plum blossoms. A few manuscripts read みえん instead. Template:Oldest and Template:Teika both felt that the みらむ reading was better because it strengthened the personification of the warbler. Teika recalled that as a boy, when he heard another poem that used みらむ, he found it elegant and interesting (see Analysis below).

Grammatically, this is a survival of an older Japanese usage; normal middle Japanese used みるらむ instead.

鶯のなく

This can be analyzed as either a RT form (thus ending with a noun, 体言止), or a SS form. Teika's Date-ke bon text reads 鶯ぞなく, which forces the RT interpretation -- that text is the base text for a number of modern editions.

Analysis

Template:Oldest praises this poem, although he believes that みらむ is hard to use in contemporary poetry. He mentions one instance; a poem in a competition by Minamoto no Yorimasa:

   霞をや煙と見ラむ武蔵野の妻もこもれるキギス鳴くなり
   The mist must look like smoke: The Kigisu, whose mate is hidden in Musashi Plains, is crying.

Shunzei was the judge for this competition and found Yorimasa's poem effective in its intentional quoting of KKS 6 (the "mate is hidden" comes from KKS 17 as well).

Template:Teika includes this poem in his Teika hachidaisho. The pseudo-Teika Template:Teika includes this as a poem that should form the basis for one's own composition.

The snow and warbler

The major topic of discussion in the poem is the warbler, and the fact that the warbler does not appear in the prose preface. Template:Edo thought that the warbler was imagined by the poet, whereas the Template:Nativist explained the warbler as out of sight. The idea seems to be that if the poet actually saw the warbler on the branch, it would appear in the prose preface.

Template:Modern disagrees, saying that the prose preface doesn't need to double what's in the poem. Katigiri goes back to the earlier commentators, stating that the prose preface does affect the reading of the poem and puts the focus away from the warbler.

Other analysis

Many commentators recognize that the poet is transferring his own desire for spring onto to the warbler (Template:Modern sees this as an example of "surplus-feeling"). The confusion between snow and plum blossoms is one that Japan got from Chinese poetry (see Takeoka p 245 for examples) -- although Seigi says that the poet finds snow more interesting than flowers, Template:Modern takes that the snow now looks like flowers because it has become spring.

Takeoka sees the third line (白雪の) as the center of the poem working almost like a kakekotoba, dividing the poem into two sections: the first about flowers, the second about snow.

Other sources

• 新撰万葉集４１. First line 春来者ハルクレバ
• 古今和歌六帖２８・残りの雪. First two lines 春たたば花とや見えん. ４３９３・うぐひす・素性. Second line 花とや見えん
• 素性集１. Preface きにゆきのふりかかりたるに
• 古来風体抄　桐火桶　定家八代抄

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