Buson - The long slow days of spring, piling up, so far away the past

遅き日のつもりて遠き昔かな (osoki hi no tsumorite tōki mukashi kana): the long slow days piling up, and how far away the past. 遅き日 is the long day of late spring, the season word, when the sun sets late and the day seems not to end; つもりて is piling up, said of days as of snow; 遠き昔 is the far past, and かな the exclamation. The verse stands in Buson's own collection of 1784 under the headnote 懐旧, longing for the past, and every collection since prints it there. The tradition gives it two parents in the old court poetry, Narihira on the days that pile up into a man's age and Ietaka on snow piling on a peak, so the long days here pile the same way. Blyth heard the bitterness of passing time in its sounds; Shirane heard the many springs gone since a youth grown far away. The English is Haruo Shirane's, from his Early Modern Japanese Literature of 2002.