Yo o kasane machikaneyama no hototogisu kumoi no yoso ni hitokoe zo kiku

English Translation

Night upon night now
I have waited past waiting
and the mountain's bird
far off, beyond the cloud-track
has given one cry, no more

Meaning

Night after night I waited past all waiting, and from Machikane the cuckoo has given one cry, far off beyond the clouds.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 205

Headnote: on the cuckoo, for the contest at the Kaya-in of the former Chancellor, in 1094.
After many nights of waiting, a single distant cry. The headnote places it at a contest held at the Kaya-in residence of the former Chancellor, Fujiwara no Morozane, the poet of the hundred and second poem in Book Two.
Suo no Naishi was a lady-in-waiting and poet of the late Heian period; her dates are not recorded. She is known by that name from her father's post as governor of Suo.
The time is a summer night; the place is Mount Machikane in Settsu Province, in what is now Toyonaka in Osaka.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line means night piled upon night, as in the run of nights of the hundred and ninety-ninth poem.
The second line is a pivot, holding at once the verb for waiting past endurance and the name of the mountain. A state of mind and a place are carried in one phrase, as in the hundred and fifty-sixth poem of Book Two.
The third line names the bird.
The word in the fourth line means the sky, and by extension somewhere far away; the word after it means elsewhere. The cry came from a distance, not from near at hand.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. What many nights of waiting won was one distant cry, and the disproportion between the waiting and its reward is the subject. The poem belongs to the series on the single cry that began at the hundred and ninety-fifth.

Author

Suo no Naishi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other