卯の花の垣根ならねど時鳥
月の桂の陰に鳴くなり
月の桂の陰に鳴くなり
- Roma-ji
-
U no hana no kakine naranedo hototogisu tsuki no katsura no kage ni naku nari
- English Translation
-
This is not a hedge
of white deutzia, and yet
the cuckoo is heard
crying in the shade beneath
the katsura of the moon
- Meaning
- There is no deutzia hedge here; and yet the cuckoo seems to be calling from the shade of the katsura tree in the moon.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 200
Headnote: on hearing a cuckoo at the shrine lodging.
The lodging of the headnote is the building in which the High Priestess secluded herself before the Kamo festival, named also in the headnote to Princess Shokushi's hundred and eighty-second poem. The poem was written on hearing a cuckoo there.
The poet, given by his court title, is Oe no Masafusa (1041-1111). Born into a family of scholars, he rose to Provisional Middle Counsellor and was learned in court precedent and in Chinese letters, leaving many writings. Poems by him also appear in Book Seven, at the seven hundred and thirtieth and seven hundred and fiftieth.
The time is a summer night; the place is the shrine lodging at Kamo.
The occasion was the cry heard there.
The tradition that a katsura tree grows in the moon comes from Chinese books and was often used in Japanese poetry.
The first two lines join a negative in the concessive form to a concessive particle. Taking up the hundred and ninetieth poem, in which the bird hid in the shade of deutzia, this one states that no such hedge is here: a poem in the run answering an earlier one.
The third line names the bird.
The fourth line names the katsura said to grow in the moon. Since there is nowhere on earth to hide, the bird must be in its shade.
The auxiliary at the close marks inference from sound. The situation of a voice heard and a body unseen is pressed as far as it will go, into an imaginary place.
Moving the hiding place from earth to the sky exaggerates the bird's invisibility, and the poem stands against the hundred and ninetieth, which gave a real hiding place.
- Author
- Oe no Masafusa
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Even having heard I cannot sleep after all cuckoo, for my heart has grown used to it, through those many nights I lay in wait
- Thinking of the past in this grass hut, in the rain falling through the night do not add your tears to mine cuckoo of the mountainside
- Rain is pouring on the flowering orange tree and the wind goes through and the mountain cuckoo cries somewhere up among the clouds