Oozora no

大空の/塵とはいかが/思うべき
　　　熱き涙の/ながるるものを
(与謝野鉄幹 1873-1935)

oozora no / chiri to ha ikaga / omou beki
　　　atsuki namida no / nagaruru mono wo
(Yosano Tekkan 1873-1935)

how should I
think of the
dust in the sky?
　　　something to make
　　　me cry hot tears...


I can't find much in the way of analysis of this poem on the web, either in English or Japanese. One thing I discovered was that it appears with '思ふ' rather than '思う' when it does appear in Japanese, though as the latter is in my book, I'll stick with that. I've noticed a lot of old texts have 'ふ', where in contemporary language you'd expect 'う', and I think I've read somewhere that it's down to changes in pronunciation. I'm a little doubtful whether pronunciation has changed that much in the last hundred years (though possibly it has), and I think the older form is used for literary effect. Returning to the poem, what little I did find was a connection between 'the dust in the sky' and hay fever. On this page is the poem next to some pictures of flowers, while on this page another poem with the same phrase (possibly influenced by Tekkan's) explicitly references hay fever or '花粉症' (kafunshou).

It's a little off-topic, but hay fever's a big problem in Japan today, though this is mainly to do with planting too many cedars after the war, so it's not really connected. Besides, though hay fever seems to be the catalyst, this tanka is surely about more than just the effects of a seasonal allergy. Having said that, I can't interpret what exactly it is about the dust in the sky that makes the poet cry such hot tears. In a famous poem, Tekkan concludes that he is 'sick at heart' (or possibly something stronger like 'in anguish'). On the same page of the book I've linked to we see that Tekkan thinks of himself sometimes as a Goethe or a Byron, and there's something of that romanticism in the above poem.

Alternate searches:

'ozora no' 'omo beki' 'omoubeki' 'omobeki' 'nagaruru mono o'