Yoshinobu Tokugawa · 徳川幕府

Original

この世をば
しばしの夢と
聞きたれど
思へば長き
月日なりけり

Yoshinobu Tokugawa's waka, "この世をばしばしの夢と聞きたれど". Read the original Japanese, modern translation, interpretation, and historical context as distinct parts of the poem.

Person

Fifteenth Tokugawa shogun, who restored governing authority to the court and later pursued photography and other arts in retirement.

Learn about Tokugawa Yoshinobu

Translation

I had heard this world was only a brief dream; looking back, the months and years were long indeed.

Poetic Shape

Tanka compresses feeling into five short movements, traditionally heard as a 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm. Its force is in the turn from image to emotion, and in what the poem leaves unsaid.

Reading

The conventional image of life as a brief dream is quietly contradicted by the final line.Yoshinobu's shogunate was short, but retirement lasted more than four decades; public history compresses what lived time experienced as long.

Background

After the restoration of governing authority and his submission following Toba-Fushimi, Yoshinobu left public politics in his early thirties.He then spent decades in Shizuoka pursuing photography, archery, painting, and waka.The poem is often labeled a death verse, but this page does not assert a deathbed composition; it treats it as a retrospective poem transmitted with the body of Yoshinobu's surviving waka.

Source / Transmission

Presented as one of Yoshinobu's transmitted waka in the tradition of the 1916 Tokugawa Yoshinobu poem collection, reproduced with transcription by Matsudo's Tojo Museum in 2013; not asserted here as a deathbed verse.