yamagawa no nagare masaru wa harukaze ni tani no kōri o fukite tokuramu
The mountain stream is Flowing high: The breeze of spring Upon the valleys’ ice Blows and melted it, I think…
Tadami 4
[i] This poem is included in Shoku goshūishū (I: 39), attributed to Kanemori, with the headnote ‘A poem from the Poetry Match held by the Reikeiden Junior Consort’.
The Left poem’s sense is extremely charming. The Right poem’s pointless introduction of blossom scattering lacks interest and its diction is also poor. Thus, I make the Left the winner.
[i] This poem is included in Shūishū (I: 6); it was also included in the third edition of Kin’yōshū (I: 10).
[ii] This poem was subsequently included in several other collections: Kin’yōshū (first edition) (I: 14); Kin’yōshū (third edition) (I: 11); Shoku goshūishu (II: 114); and Mandaishū (II: 348).
While in the Left ‘ice appears’ and ‘is not, perhaps, melted’ seem to have some kind of linkage, if we consider this as a Cathay-style poem saying ‘A chill night’s moon / Ice atop the swell’, then I would have preferred it to say ‘is, perhaps, bound’. An alternative version of this would, of course, be ‘A spring morn’s breeze / Ice on the eastern shore’ which could lead to ‘is not, perhaps, melted’, I think. The Right has ‘On the coast before the shrine / Even the pine needles’ and through this type of linkage expresses the brightness of the moon. While this type of smug-sounding expression also appeared in the round before last, the moon here does seem bright and so I can say that the Right wins.
