Shunzei is referring to Sugawara no Michizane’s preface to poems on the Third Day of the Third Month in the Wakan Rōeishū here: ‘In the final month of spring, and the third morn of that month, blossoms do intoxicate the heavens – it is, indeed, the season of a profusion of peaches!’

The Kyokusui no utage (or kokusui no en) 曲水の宴, a court occasion when poets would seat themselves beside a stream, and sake cups would be floated down to them. When the cup reached each poet, he would take it from the water, drink the sake, and recite a poem he had composed for the occasion. The earliest record of this being carried out in Japan is in 485, to celebrate the accession of Emperor Kenzō 顕宗天皇, although there then appears to have been a gap of just over two hundred years until it became a regular part of the Court’s activities in the Nara period, usually taking place on the Third day of the Third Month.

Thought to be a reference to Shunzei’s former teacher and a famous poet in his own right, Fujiwara no Mototoshi 藤原基俊 (1060-1142).

The original poem, refers to an actual place name saya no nakayama (小夜の中山 ), which was an actual place on the road between the capital and the eastern provinces, where the trail passed along a ridge with deep valleys on either side, the ‘brief nights’.

The implication in the poem is that the poet has been left to travel on alone, abandoned by his travelling companion, so he alone sees the moon here. The place name is, of course, used as it contains the sense of ‘night’ and hence reinforces the reference to the moon.

The ‘cursed crashing waves’ are a reference to the poet’s lover’s unfaithfulness…

Miyagino 宮城野, which I have translated here as ‘Miyagi Fields’, was a famous poetic location outside of Sendai in the north of Japan, and was famous for the profusion of bush clover (hagi 萩) which grew there in autumn.

A reference to the wood surrounding the shrine at Ikuta. Located in what is now Kobe, this was a shrine dedicated to Wakahirume no Kami (稚日女神), the deity of weaving and younger sister of Amaterasu Ōmikami who, according to myth, died when she struck herself on the genitals with a shuttle when starting in surprise at the skin of a piebald colt flung into the sacred weaving hall by Susa no O no Mikoto (素盞鳴尊). This handicap does not appear to have prevented her halting the boat of Empress Jingū in Kobe harbour when returning from a campaign in Korea and demanding the establishment of a shrine to her as the price of passage. The wood around the shrine was well-known and freqently referred to in poetry. More detail on the shrine (in Japanese) and pictures of it can be found here .

Teika is here referring to the nagoshi no harae (夏越の祓), a purification ritual carried out every year on the last day of the Sixth lunar month (towards the end of August) in order to avoid illness and ill fortune in the second half of the year. Despite what he says in the poem, it did not generally involve cleansing oneself with water: people would visit their local shrine and be purified by passing through a hoop of cogon grass.

The ‘waterless month’ (minazuki 水無月) was a poetic term for the Sixth lunar month, the last month of summer.

Warblers were believed to return to the same nests to raise that years clutch of chicks, and so their return became a conventional harbinger of the end of spring.