jamelah
rainy evening, june
The lives of poets, it’s been said, are lived mostly in the head and heart. We know of poets who were bankers and accountants, poets who were postal carriers, poets who were academics and scholars. But there are also those rare poets whose lives were as full of passion as their poems.
So it was with Ariwara no Narihira, the 9th century Japanese poet. Narihira has been named one of the Rokkasen—the six poet-geniuses of classical Japanese poetry. He is thought to have been the inspiration for the adventurous young lover in the Tales of Ise as well as for the protagonist in the Tale of Genji. Although he was related by birth to two emperors, Narihira never attained high rank at court; contemporaneous sources hint this was due to a scandal involving Narihira and one (or possibly two) of the Imperial Consorts.
Although much of his life is obscured by myth and fantasy and rumor, we do know this: One Spring morning Narihira woke and, looking out on the rain as it fell in his garden, wrote a poem to an unnamed woman he’d been seeing in secret.
Not awake and yet
Not sleepless through the night, and
With the dawn
Comes a scene from Spring:
Ever-falling rain to gaze upon all day.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
