Hana chirishi niwa no ko no ha mo shigeriaite amateru tsuki no kage zo mare naru

English Translation

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

Meaning

In the garden where the flowers fell the leaves have grown thick together, and the light of the moon overhead comes through only seldom.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 186

Headnote: topic unknown.
The third poem on summer grasses. After the flowers come the leaves, and the leaves shut out the moon. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Sone no Yoshitada was a mid-Heian poet, known by a shortened name from his post as a secretary in Tango. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-seventh poem.
The time is early summer; the place is the poet's garden.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

A past auxiliary in the attributive form marks the falling of the flowers as something already done, so that one garden's spring and summer are joined in a single poem.
The particle in the second line carries the sense of the leaves too, in place of the flowers.
The third line means growing thick and overlapping one another: what the flowers held is now held by leaves.
The fourth line names the moon shining overhead.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive form at the close, and the word for light is the one used of the moon. In the hundred and eightieth poem deutzia was taken for moonlight; here leaves shut the moonlight out, and the relation of moon and plant is reversed. As the hundred and forty-seventh and hundred and forty-eighth poems of Book Two showed empty branches after the fall, this one shows those branches covered over.

Author

Sone no Yoshitada

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other