This waka (the “most traditional” Japanese poetic form—the 5-7-5 familiar from haiku, followed by two more lines of seven morae each) is the work of the twelfth-century monk-poet Saigyō. It appears in the seventeenth volume of 1205's Shin Kokin Wakashū (新古今和歌集, “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems”), the eighth of the twenty-one Imperial Poetry Anthologies, whose intermediate points in the sequence is reflected in its modifier-heavy title. The doves in the poem make me think of this as something of a “Pentecost special,” especially since there is plenty of explicitly Pentecost-themed literature, such as Eliot's “Four Quartets” or O'Connor's “The Enduring Chill,” with just as morose a style and tone.

Many of Saigyō's poems, as with those of his later emulator Bashō, are unmediated descriptions of experiences he had traveling around Japan. In perhaps no other literature is the travelogue as august a literary form. Japan mastered it as early and as thoroughly as Occitania mastered the lyric poem or England the novel.