忘れめや葵を草に引き結び
仮寝の野辺の露の曙
仮寝の野辺の露の曙
- Roma-ji
-
Wasureme ya aoi o kusa ni hikimusubi karine no nobe no tsuyu no akebono
- English Translation
-
Could I forget it
the hollyhock tied in knots
about the grasses
and dozing out in the field
and the dew at break of day
- Meaning
- How could I forget it: the hollyhock knotted into the grass, the light sleep out in the field, the dew at daybreak.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 182
Headnote: at the shrine lodging, when she was serving as High Priestess.
A run of poems connected with the Kamo festival begins here. This one recalls her years as High Priestess. The lodging of the headnote is the building in which the priestess secluded herself before the festival.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, was chosen while still a child as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine and held that office for more than ten years. In Book One she is the poet of the third, fifty-second and eighty-third poems, and in Book Two of the hundred and first, hundred and thirty-seventh and hundred and forty-ninth.
The time is daybreak at the season of the festival, held on the middle day of the Cock in the fourth month, when hollyhock was worn; the place is an open field.
The occasion was her looking back, after leaving the office, on those days.
She left several poems recalling her time as priestess, and this is counted among them.
The first line joins a conjectural auxiliary in the concessive form to a rhetorical particle: could I forget? I could not. The assertion comes first and its content follows, in inversion.
The plant named in the second line is the one used at the Kamo festival; its name sounds like the phrase for a day of meeting, so that it also belongs to love poetry. Here the ritual sense is uppermost, but the other is audible.
The third line means drawing two stems together and knotting them. Knotting grass on a journey was also a way of praying for safety on the road.
The word in the fourth line means a light sleep away from home, and refers to a night spent in the fields as priestess.
The poem closes on a noun. Dew belongs to daybreak and hints at tears. The poem declares that it will not forget and never says what; only a scene is given, and the scene carries the whole recollection.
- Author
- Princess Shokushi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The deutzia blooms here and there along the hedge in scattered clusters and I take the hedge itself for moonlight between the clouds
- When the deutzia has opened along the hedge I look and I see a fence that has been woven of white waves, and nothing else
- How can it be so that the hollyhock that grows on that hill of gods has passed year upon year through and still bears but its two leaves
- The fields are not yet at the marsh at Asaka the grass that is cut and even as I see it the season has grown it thick