しぐれのみ降る山里の木のしたは
をる人からやもりすぎぬらむ
をる人からやもりすぎぬらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Shigure nomi furu yamazato no ko no shita wa oru hito kara ya morisuginuramu
- English Translation
-
Under the branches
in a hill village where the
cold rains only fall
is it the one standing there
that lets the wet through and past
- Meaning
- In a hill village where nothing falls but cold rain, under the branches — is it because of the one standing there that the wet comes leaking through?
- Commentary
-
32 The Grass of Musashino
The Master of the Right Capital Office composed "Aware chō hito mo arubeku Musashino no kusa to dani koso oubekarikere" and presented it to the Teiji retired emperor, and then "Shigure nomi furu yamazato no ko no shita wa oru hito kara ya morisuginuramu" as well. The emperor did not take the matter up. Muneyuki was told that on reading them the emperor had said he could make nothing of them and had shown them to a bishop; and he was heard to say afterwards that his poems had been wasted. That is the whole of the section.
The Master of the Right Capital Office is Minamoto no Muneyuki, a grandson of Emperor Kōkō and one of the thirty-six poetic immortals. In the thirty-first section he sends a poem to the Lady of the Palace Guards, and in the thirtieth he composes on seaweed. The Teiji retired emperor is Emperor Uda, who appears in the first and second sections. A bishop ranked below an archbishop in the priestly hierarchy.
The setting is again the retired emperor's residence. This is the second poem, sent after the first.
What prompted it was the same failure of his promotion. He presented it in addition to the first.
The emperor took up neither. Hearing that he had said he could make nothing of them and had shown them to a bishop, Muneyuki said his poems had been wasted.
The verb for the rain falling is also the verb for time passing, so that the ceaseless cold rain and a life spent weeping are heard together.
Under a tree in a hill village is a place where one ought to be sheltered from rain; the situation is of getting wet while under cover.
The word in the fourth line means both breaking off a branch and standing there, so that the line asks whose fault the wetness is.
The final verb means to leak — the rain coming through the branches, and a man leaking out of the list of promotions. The poem is stacked with puns, and the emperor's saying he could make nothing of it is not unrelated to how densely it is worked.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- More than when I thought of such things as another's affair, it is the summer night's dream, never seen through to its end, that is frail
- That there might be one to call me dear — I should have been born, if nothing better, at least as the grass that grows on Musashi plain
- This body of ivy with no tree at whose foot it might lean and take hold stays green the whole year, and so the autumn is sorrowful
- Though you may not think its colour anything much still, this flower — I would have you look on it and remember, from time to time