Kakinomoto no Hitomaro

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro was a court poet of the late Asuka period and is regarded as the greatest poet of the Man'yoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry. Little is certain about his life beyond what his poems suggest: he served at the courts of the Empress Jito and the Emperor Mommu, wrote ceremonial laments and praise-poems for members of the imperial house, and is thought to have died in the province of Iwami. He is the first of the later Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry.

These five poems come from Clara A. Walsh's The Master-Singers of Japan (1910), where he appears as Hitomaro, Kakinomoto no Asomi. They are English verse renderings made for a general audience: Walsh turns the long poems (choka) and their envoys (hanka) into rhymed English stanzas, and her versions are not literal.