By: Yamabe no Akahito (700 – 736)       山部赤人

At Tago Bay,                                                  田子の浦に
I’m hit by the sight of                                 うちいでて見れば
White cloth                                                    白妙の
On Fuji’s peak                                              富士の高嶺に
And falling snow                                         雪はふりつつ

東海道江尻田子の浦略図 | 葛飾北斎

Surprisingly, there are no translation notes provided with this tanka.  The only information that I have is that the poet, Yamabe Akahito, was a contemporary for the poet for No. 3, and that he, like Kakinomoto,  was regarded as one of the greatest of the early poets and subsequently deified as a god of Poetry.  Looking up Tago Bay, according to the interwebs, Tago is a seaside town/village/place that is known for its amazing views of Mt. Fuji.  Tago is also one of the locations in the super famous Mt. Fuji/boat/wave art series (No. 36 in a series of 36 paintings), so it is most probably a place that Yamabe would have strolled along before being struck by inspiration to write this tanka.

In a way, it’s kind of refreshing to read a tanka that wasn’t inspired from some sort of intense emotion (I’m only on No. 4; by the time I get to No. 100 I’ll be all drained out of emotions haha).  It really shows how the Japanese people appreciated and enjoyed nature and the environment around them, I think, and how the beauty of the environment could connect so strongly to their spiritual selves or souls.  I know Western poets get inspired by the beauty of the environment too, but I’ve found that they don’t capture the simplistic depths of nature and its reflection on the human spirit quite as well as Eastern poets.  This tanka, in any case, paints such a reverential scene of falling snow, and it could mean something deeper, with the cleanliness of snow and the passage of winter, or it could just be a poet enjoying the scenery as he walks along the shores of Tago Bay.

Morning Light on the Shores of Lake Yamanaka | T. Enami