Onoga tsuma koitsutsu naku ya satsukiyami Kannabiyama no yamahototogisu

English Translation

Longing for its mate
it calls and goes on calling
in the dark of May
the mountain cuckoo crying
on the hill of Kannabi

Meaning

Is it longing for its mate that keeps it calling, the mountain cuckoo on Kannabi, in the rainy dark of the fifth month?

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 194

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The cuckoo's voice again, but here its reason is found in longing for a mate, so that human feeling is laid on the bird. The original gives neither a fresh headnote nor a fresh attribution.
As before, the poet is recorded only as unknown.
The time is a dark night in the rains of the fifth month; the place is Kannabi hill, the same district as the Kannabi river of Prince Atsumi's hundred and sixty-first poem.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first line means its own mate; the possessive is the word used in Tsurayuki's hundred and sixty-sixth poem in Book Two.
A continuative particle in the second line keeps the calling going, and an interrogative particle reasons toward a cause: is longing what keeps it at it? The hundred and ninth poem of Book Two read human words into a warbler's cry in the same way.
The third line names the moonless dark of the fifth-month rains. The previous poem had moonlight; this one has darkness, and the two make a pair of light and dark.
The fourth line fixes the place, a hill where a god was held to dwell.
The poem closes on a noun. The prefix marks it as a bird still in the mountains, not yet come down to the villages. A voice heard in darkness with nothing to see belongs with the run that began at the hundred and ninetieth poem.

Author

Unknown Poet

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

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