桜麻の麻生の下草茂れただ
飽かで別れし花の名なれば
飽かで別れし花の名なれば
- Roma-ji
-
Sakuraasa no ou no shitakusa shigere tada akade wakareshi hana no na nareba
- English Translation
-
Under the hemp field
let the low grass grow thickly
only because it
bears the name of the flower
I parted from too early
- Meaning
- Grass beneath the cherry-hemp, grow thick: you carry the name of the flower I parted from before I had my fill.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 185
Headnote: a summer poem, from the time when she presented a hundred-poem sequence to Retired Emperor Sutoku.
The second poem on summer grasses. A kind of hemp whose name contains the word for cherry is made to carry the poet's feeling for the flowers that have gone. The headnote refers to the Kyuan sequences of 1150, from which the thirteenth poem of Book One and the hundred and thirty-first of Book Two also come.
Taikenmon-in no Aki was a lady-in-waiting and poet in the service of Empress Shoshi, consort of Emperor Toba. Her dates are not recorded.
The time is early summer; the place is a field of hemp.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line names a kind of hemp whose name includes the word for cherry, so that the spring flower is called to mind. Building a poem on nothing but a coincidence of names is its device.
The second line names the field of hemp and the low grass growing beneath it.
The third line is an imperative: only grow thick. The command comes first and its reason follows, in inversion.
The verb in the fourth line means not to have had one's fill, the word used in the ninety-ninth, hundred and fifth, hundred and ninth and hundred and sixty-fourth poems of Book Two. What was parted from unsatisfied is the cherry.
The fifth line gives the reason for the command. To care for a plant only because it shares a name is a deliberate excess of feeling, and a summer poem is still grieving over a spring flower. Like Jien's hundred and seventy-seventh poem on the missing shade of blossom, it stands where summer keeps looking back.
- Author
- Taikenmon-in no Aki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Only for a while he came, and I resented and now he comes not and by these blades of grasses I think of him even now