Before the White Chysanthemum
Japanese Poetry


Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.


Translated by Robert Hass



Anonymous: In the autumn fields

From the early section of the love poems of the Kokinoshu.

In the autumn fields
mingled with the pampas grass
flowers are blooming
should my love too, spring forth
or shall we never meet?

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Sugawara Michizane (845-903): The autumn breeze rises

Japanese poets often delight in exploring ambiguities. One of their favorite themes is the difficulty of discerning one white object from another: a white spider on a white flower, or here, white flowers and the foam of waves beating against the shore. Nature in the Heian period (794-1186) was never an untamed wilderness but most typically represented by the carefully tended garden or a painting on a folding screen. This poem was attached to a chrysanthemum during a courtly competition where the flower was placed in a miniature representation of the beach at Fukiage done in a tray. The author is best known as a scholar and poet of Chinese verse.

The autumn breeze rises
on the shore at Fukiage--
and those white chrysanthemums
are they flowers? or not?
or only breakers on the beach?

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/japanese_poetry.html



Chrysanthemums are said to have first come from China although they are more often associated with Japan. According to an ancient Chinese legend, about 3,000 years ago an emperor was told that the Dragonfly Island in the Sunrise Sea (Japan) had a magic herb that would restore his youth. But since only youth could collect it, he sent a dozen young men and a dozen girls to the island.

They arrived at the islands after surviving perilous storms and attacks by sea serpents, and finding neither magic herb nor inhabitants on the island, they decided to stay. The prized possession they brought for trading, and now nurtured as a tie with their homeland, was the golden chrysanthemum.
Japan's imperial emblem for ten centuries featured a golden chrysanthemum with sixteen petals. In the War of Dynasties, which began in 1357 and lasted for 55 years, each warrior of the South wore a yellow chrysanthemum as a golden badge of courage.