Hototogisu mada uchitokenu shinobine wa konu hito o matsu ware nomi zo kiku

English Translation

Not yet at its ease
the cuckoo's half-hidden voice
and it is only
I, who wait for one who won't
come at all, who am hearing

Meaning

The cuckoo's voice, still guarded and low, is heard by no one but me, who am waiting for someone who will not come.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 198

Headnote: on the theme of hearing the cuckoo while waiting for a guest.
The topic is that phrase, and the conceit is that only one who sits up for a visitor who never comes will hear the cuckoo's guarded first notes.
Retired Emperor Shirakawa was the eldest son of Emperor Go-Sanjo and began the rule of the cloistered sovereigns after his abdication. This is his second appearance in this book, after the hundred and eightieth poem.
The time is a summer night; the place is the poet's residence.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first line names the bird.
The verb in the second line means to drop one's guard, to become easy. In Prince Koreakira's thirty-first poem in Book One it did double duty for ice thawing and a heart softening; here it means that the bird is not yet used to people and is sparing of its voice.
The third line names the low, half-suppressed call the cuckoo gives early in the season, before it sings in earnest.
The fourth line names the waiting for one who does not come. The bird's held-back voice and the unanswered waiting are laid together as two unsatisfied things.
A limiting particle and an emphatic one govern the attributive verb at the close: only one who does not sleep can hear it. The reward of the waiting comes not from the person awaited but from a bird.

Author

Retired Emperor Shirakawa

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other