Sadakichi Hartmann’s five-line “Tanka 5” begins with a quiet announcement of emotional loss: “Though love has grown cold.” The opening “Though” matters because it turns that loss into a subordinate fact, not the whole truth. The next line counters the chill with colour: “The woods are bright with flowers.” Immediately, the poem sets up its central tension between an inner winter and an outer spring. Rather than remaining in grief, the speaker asks the rhetorical question, “Why not as of old / Go to the wildwood bowers / And dream of — bygone hours!” Memory, the poem suggests, is a place that can be deliberately revisited; even when love has failed, the natural world and the dreaming mind remain open to each other.
The construction creates that movement from coldness to an almost brave nostalgia. Written in five lines, the poem uses the compressed shape of a tanka, and its lines hover around a short, song-like pulse. The first and third lines stay brief, while the second and fourth open up into fuller natural images: “The woods are bright with flowers” and “Go to the wildwood bowers” both spread across seven syllables. Rhyme strengthens the movement. The hard, monosyllabic “cold” finds its answer in “old,” while “flowers,” “bowers” and “hours” share a lingering open vowel at the end, as if the last three lines exhale or call out toward the past.
The imagery is deliberately simple, but each key word carries weight. “Cold” turns love into a temperature, something that has lost its heat, making the speaker’s inner world wintry even while the woods blossom. Against that, “bright with flowers” is visually and emotionally warm; nature does not wait for human feeling to thaw. “Wildwood bowers” matters because a bower is a sheltered, leafy recess, a place of enclosure and intimacy. The phrase suggests somewhere both wild and welcoming, and the word “old” in “as of old” makes the journey a return rather than a first discovery. That idea of returning prepares for the final noun, “hours,” which turns time into something dreamlike and recoverable.
The punctuation of the last line is especially revealing. The dash in “And dream of — bygone hours!” forces a pause before “bygone,” a small intake of breath before memory is named. The exclamation mark then pushes the ending past resignation; the speaker is not merely sighing but deciding to find sweetness in what has vanished. The phrase “bygone hours” treats time not as an abstraction to be mourned but as an atmosphere to be dreamed in. The speaker does not say love can be revived; he says only that the past can be visited, and that the flowers are still there.
That balance is what makes “Tanka 5” significant. Many lyrics about lost love stay in either pure pain or pure idealisation. Here, the first four words admit the love has failed, yet the poem refuses to let failure extinguish memory or the beauty of the present. The title’s numeral hints that this is one moment in a sequence, a small stage in a larger emotional life. In five lines, Hartmann offers a quietly liberating answer to grief: the wildwood bowers of the mind remain open, and to dream of bygone hours is not to deny the cold but to walk through it toward the flowers.