Ariake no tsuki wa matanu ni idenuredo nao yama fukaki hototogisu kana

English Translation

The dawn moon has come
though I did not wait for it
and still, deep within
the mountains, it has not come
the cuckoo I have waited

Meaning

The dawn moon, which I was not waiting for, has come up; and the cuckoo is still deep in the mountains.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 212

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, on the cuckoo's heart.
What is not waited for arrives and what is waited for does not. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Taira no Chikamune (1144-1199), of the Kanmu Taira, who rose to Provisional Middle Counsellor.
The time is a summer daybreak; no place is given.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first two lines mean: though I was not even waiting for it. Yoshitsune's two hundred and ninth poem also begins with the dawn moon, and the two share the word; there the moon had gone, here it has risen.
The concessive particle in the third line turns the sentence.
The fourth line means still far back in the hills. The phrase for deep mountains is used in the third and twenty-fourth poems of Book One and the hundred and twenty-second of Book Two, where it measured a place; here it measures the bird's distance.
The poem closes on a noun with an exclamatory particle. The disproportion, that the unwanted comes and the wanted does not, is the frame of the poem, and it is the frame of the hundred and seventy-sixth piece in this book, which set a departing spring against a summer robe that came unasked.

Author

Taira no Chikamune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other