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Fujiwara no Michinobu Ason

Meaning

I know that after dawn comes dusk — and yet how I resent this pale morning sky.

Commentary

The poem's logic is elegant: the speaker knows intellectually that this dawn will eventually become evening, when his lover might return — yet this knowledge does nothing to ease the present pain of parting. It captures the gap between reason and feeling with quiet precision.

Fujiwara no Michinobu died young, at around twenty-three years of age. His brief life and early death gave him a romantic aura, and his poems were praised for their clarity and directness. This poem captures the particular Heian ache of the compulsory dawn parting.

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