Inariyama ōku no toshi zo koenikeri inoru shirushi no sugi o tanomite

English Translation

Over Mount Inari
how many years I have gone,
crossing and crossing,
trusting to the cedar sprig
that is the sign of prayer.

Meaning

Over Mount Inari I have crossed, and crossed again, through many years, trusting to the cedar sprig that is the token of prayer.

Commentary

23 Poems Offered at Inari and Kamo

The ninth month came, and thinking that the world would be at its most beautiful, that she should like to go on a pilgrimage somewhere and lay before the god the frailty of her own situation, she set out very quietly to a certain place. On a single sheaf of offerings she wrote these poems: one for the lower shrine, one for the middle, one for the last. Then, at the end of the same month, she went in the same manner to another place, this time with two sheaves: two poems for the lower shrine and two for the upper. Such were the things she muttered where no god could hear them.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The place she visited in secret is understood to be Inari at Fushimi, since one of the poems names Mount Inari. The other place, visited at the end of the same month, is understood to be the Kamo shrines, since the poems speak of the purification stream and the sacred grove. The text names neither shrine, calling them only the lower, the middle and the last, and the lower and the upper.
It is the ninth month of the third year of Kōhō, and the place is the middle shrine of the sanctuary she visited in secret.
After the poem for the lower shrine, this was written for the middle one.
She then wrote "Kamigami to noborikudari wa waburedomo mada sakayukanu kokoro koso sure" for the last shrine, and at the end of the month went on pilgrimage to another sanctuary.

The opening names the shrine outright. Of the three poems only this one gives the place, and it is by this poem that we know the sanctuary visited in secret to be Inari. The verb in the second and third lines means both to cross a mountain and to pass a year, and the poem turns on it: the many climbings of the hill and the many years gone by are held in one word, so that the very span of a devotion repeatedly offered and never answered is written into the verse. The emphatic particle governs the close, and its auxiliary lends the note of a thing realized. The cedar of the fourth line is the sprig given at Inari and carried home as a token of prayer, and the word for token also means efficacy. The close means: trusting to that, and it trails off as if unfinished. The reproach — that she trusted, and to no end — is never put into words; what remains is only the number of the years she has crossed.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other