Mukashi omou kusa no iori no yoru no ame ni namida na soe so yamahototogisu

English Translation

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

Meaning

Here in my grass hut, thinking of old days in the night rain, do not add your tears to it, cuckoo of the hills.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 201

Headnote: a poem on the cuckoo, among a hundred set by the former Regent, now a lay monk, when he was Minister of the Right.
The poem refuses in advance the tears the cuckoo's voice would bring. The former Regent of the headnote is Fujiwara no Kanezane, and the poem belongs to the hundred he commissioned while Minister of the Right; Shunzei's fifth poem in Book One comes from the same sequence.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei, compiler of the Senzai Wakashu and father of Teika. In Book One he is the poet of the fifth, fifteenth, sixteenth and fifty-ninth poems, and in Book Two of the hundredth, hundred and fourteenth and hundred and fifty-ninth.
The time is a summer night; the place is a hut thatched with grass.
The occasion was the set topic of the cuckoo.
The poem is among Shunzei's best known and was taken up repeatedly by later critics.

The first line means thinking of days gone by, and gives the state of mind of the man in the hut before anything else.
The second line names a rough dwelling thatched with grass, and in one phrase tells us that he has taken orders.
The third line sets the scene. Thoughts of the past, a poor hut and night rain are laid together, and the conditions for tears are already complete.
The fourth line uses a prohibitive construction, the form of Akahito's hundred and tenth poem in Book Two, which ordered the spring rain not to fall: an order given to nature that can have no effect. The verb means to add: do not add your tears to the rain. The implication is that the rain is enough already.
The poem closes on a noun, so that the one addressed comes last, in inversion. In a run of poems waiting for the voice, this one alone refuses it, and longing and rejection are turned upon the same bird.

Author

Fujiwara no Shunzei

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other