かみやせくしもにやみくづ積るらむ
思ふこゝろの行かぬみたらし
思ふこゝろの行かぬみたらし
- Roma-ji
-
Kami ya seku shimo ni ya mikuzu tsumoruramu omou kokoro no yukanu mitarashi
- English Translation
-
Is it dammed above,
or has the water's refuse
gathered down below?
My praying heart cannot pass
along this purifying stream.
- Meaning
- Is it dammed above, or has the refuse gathered below? My praying heart cannot make its way along this purifying stream.
- 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 end of the ninth month of the third year of Kōhō, and the place is the lower shrine of another sanctuary visited in the same quiet way.
At the end of the same month in which she went to Inari, she went in the same manner to another place, this time with two sheaves of offerings, and wrote this first for the lower shrine.
She wrote a second poem for the same lower shrine, "Sakakiba no tokiwa kakiwa ni yūshide ya katakurushi naru me na miseso kami," and then two more for the upper shrine.
The word at the opening means the upper reaches of a stream and also a god, and the poem turns on it: is the water dammed upstream, or is it the god who is holding it back? The second line asks whether it is below instead, so that the very place — the lower shrine — becomes part of the language of the poem. The refuse named there is what collects in water and blocks a current. The conjectural ending, with the interrogative particle of the first line, sets two possible causes side by side as a question. The fourth line means that her praying heart cannot get through, laying the failure of the stream to run over the failure of the prayer to arrive. The close names the stream that runs before a shrine for the washing of hands, and the noun ending leaves the question suspended. In asking whether the fault lies with the god or with what has silted up on her own side, the poem declines to settle the blame on either — and that is where its composure lies.
- Author
- The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- Over Mount Inari how many years I have gone, crossing and crossing, trusting to the cedar sprig that is the sign of prayer.
- Calling on the gods, I climb and I come down again, and it is hard going; and still the slope is not done, and still my fortunes do not rise.
- By the sacred tree, evergreen and unchanging, by its hanging streamers: let me not see such hard, such bitter days again, O god.
- When, oh when, I say, and say again, and go on waiting all this while — waiting for the hour I see light through the trees of the grove.