Hitokoe wa omoi zo aenu hototogisu tasogaredoki no kumo no mayoi ni

English Translation

That one cry of his
I cannot have done with it
cuckoo, at the hour
of dusk, when the clouds go by
and nothing is certain there

Meaning

One cry, and I cannot have done with thinking of it: the cuckoo, at dusk, among the drifting confusion of the clouds.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 208

Headnote: composed on the cuckoo.
One cry does not satisfy. The headnote gives the bird as the topic.
Hachijoin no Takakura was a lady-in-waiting and poet in the service of Princess Shoshi, known as Hachijoin, a daughter of Emperor Toba. Her dates are not recorded. In Book One she is the poet of the fifty-fourth poem.
The time is a summer dusk; no place is given.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first line marks that only one cry was heard.
The verb in the second line, attached to another verb, adds the sense of doing a thing through to the end; with an emphatic particle and a negative in the attributive form, it means that the thought cannot be finished with, that it will not settle.
The third line names the bird.
The fourth line names dusk, the hour at which a face can no longer be told, a word that carries indistinctness with it.
The word at the close means confusion, a drifting into disorder. A dusk of moving cloud, with no fixed outline, is placed last. That only one cry was heard and that neither the hour nor the sky is definite come together, and the impossibility of making sure covers the whole. Where Sagami's two hundred and third poem regretted the single cry, this one gives the state of a mind left suspended by it.

Author

Hachijoin no Takakura

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other