28 山里は 冬ぞさびしさ まさりける 人目も草も かれぬと思へば
Apologies for being doubly late.
I’m really vibing with the ゆき poems in this collection, and look, this one is by the grandson of Emperor Koko, whose poem 15 I also did. Funny that.
I found two different blogs citing the same professor who said that this poem was written in answer to the question which season is lonelier, winter or fall? Muneyuki of course favoured fall, but he might have been responding to the more popular idea that it was fall. This is my own conjecture, but maybe poem 5 would be a good typical example of the treatment of fall to which Muneyuki is responding (however, Taifu’s date of birth and death being unknown, how direct this connection is could not be figured out).
Interestingly, in Teika’s time (I presume my source is referring to the HNI’s compiler), the 12th and 13th century, remote mountain villages had shifted from symbols of desolation to places for appreciating nature. I just think that makes this poem’s inclusion in the anthology a bit more interesting.