Hyakunin Isshu: Meet the Poets
Sakanoue no Korenori

Meaning

In the early morning light, the village of Yoshino is blanketed in white — it looks just like the pale glow of the dawn moon.

Commentary

This poem plays on a moment of genuine visual ambiguity. In the dim light before full sunrise, the white snow blanketing Yoshino looks almost exactly like the pale glow of the waning moon low in the sky. The poet holds both images open at once — moon and snow, sky and earth — and that double vision is the poem's quiet pleasure.

Yoshino, in present-day Nara Prefecture, was a celebrated poetic landscape — famous for its cherry blossoms in spring and its deep snowfall in winter. Sakanoue no Korenori served as an official in the mid-Heian court and was known for the clear, precise imagery of his verse. This poem appears in the Kokinshū's winter section.

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