Karisome no kusa no makura no yonayona o omoiyaru ni mo sode zo tsuyukeki

English Translation

Night after night on
that grass pillow of a night,
taken for a while—
and only to think of them
leaves my sleeves wet with the dew.

Meaning

Only to think of those nights of yours, one after another on a grass pillow taken for a while, leaves my sleeves wet as with dew.

Commentary

Section 21 Tamesuke's Fifty Poems and the Replies to Them

Through the summer, letters stopped coming to a strange degree, and her uneasiness was more than ordinary. News that waves were rising on the shore of Shiga and that there were disturbances at the Mountain and at Miidera made her more anxious still. At last, on the second of the eighth month, a messenger arrived, and she gathered up and read the letters that had been accumulating from various people. From the young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, came fifty poems, sent down without even a fair copy made, saying that he had composed them. His poems had grown very fine. That eighteen of the fifty should have earned her mark seemed to her strange, and doubtless her parent's blind love was at fault. Among them she found one poem, and taking it to have been written out of thought for her under a traveller's sky, she was moved, and beside that poem, in small characters, she wrote an answer and sent it back. Beside another poem on the same travel topic she likewise added an answer. Then, at the end of the fifty, she wrote a note, setting down her general remarks on the poems, and at the very end she added a poem of her own.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, is her son Tamesuke, called the Jiju since the section of parting poems, who on the day of her departure answered her with "Tsui ni yomo ada ni wa naraji moshiogusa katami o miyo no ato ni nokoseba." This section takes an unusual form for an exchange: she marks his fifty poems, and writes her replies in small characters beside them. The one long gone, named in the poem at the end, is the dead Tameie, the person to whom she would above all have liked to show these fifty.

After the second day of the eighth month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, over the fifty poems that had come from the capital.

Another of the fifty, on the same topic of travel.

Abutsu-ni added an answer beside this poem too: "Aki fukaki kusa no makura ni ware zo naku furisutete koshi suzumushi no ne o."

Tears shed for another's lodging on the road are laid over dew on the grass. The first line means makeshift, taken for the moment, and gives the frailty of a traveller's shelter. The second line, the grass pillow, means sleeping on the road, from the practice of knotting grass for a headrest; the prose of this diary had used the same phrase of the dead Tameie standing beside her at that pillow. The third line, night after night, shows that this is not one night but a continuing succession. The particle in the fourth line means, at the mere thought of it. The closing adjective means dewy, wet with tears, and an emphatic particle bound to it gathers everything onto the sleeve. Grass and dew are associated words, so that the tears are drawn out of the same vegetation as the pillow. It is a poem from the child in the capital about the mother on the road, and where "Kokoro nomi hedatezu tote mo tabigoromo yamaji kasanaru ochi no shirakumo" sang of distance, this sings of the nights.

Author

Reizei Tameuji

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other