野辺はいまだあさかの沼に刈る草の
かつみるままに茂るころかな
かつみるままに茂るころかな
- Roma-ji
-
Nobe wa imada Asaka no numa ni karu kusa no katsu miru mama ni shigeru koro kana
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- The fields are still shallow with green; and at the marsh of Asaka the grass is cut and thickens again even as one watches.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 184
Headnote: for the place where the marsh of Asaka was painted on the sliding screens of the Saisho Shitenno-in.
A run on summer grasses begins here. The Saisho Shitenno-in was a chapel built by Retired Emperor Go-Toba, and poems were written to accompany the paintings of famous places on its screens; this one belongs to the panel showing the marsh of Asaka. The hundred and thirty-third poem of Book Two comes from the same undertaking.
The poet is Asukai no Masatsune, one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-fourth, ninety-third and ninety-fourth poems, and in Book Two of the hundred and forty-fifth.
The time is early summer; the place is the marsh of Asaka in Mutsu Province, in what is now Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture, known for a kind of wild rice.
The occasion was the writing of poems for the screens.
The first line means that the grass of the fields is still short, and instead of completing itself it runs on into the place name below.
The name in the second line sounds the word for shallow and so takes up the first line: a place name and a description in one word.
The third line names the grass cut at that marsh.
The word in the fourth line means on the one hand, and also no sooner than. It sounds at the same time the name of the plant for which the marsh was known, so that a word tied to the place is chosen.
The poem closes on an exclamatory particle. The vigour of summer grass, thickening as fast as it is cut, is the subject. As a poem for a painted place, it works the name of the site and of its produce into the same words.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Masatsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Under the hemp field let the low grass grow thickly only because it bears the name of the flower I parted from too early
- In the garden where the flowers fell, the leaves are thick against the sky and the light of the moon there shining above comes rarely