過ぎにけり信太の森の時鳥
絶えぬ雫を袖に残して
絶えぬ雫を袖に残して
- Roma-ji
-
Suginikeri Shinoda no mori no hototogisu taenu shizuku o sode ni nokoshite
- English Translation
-
It has gone on past
the cuckoo of Shinoda's
wood, and left behind
on my sleeve the dripping that
has not once ceased to fall there
- Meaning
- It has passed by, the cuckoo of the wood at Shinoda, leaving on my sleeve a dripping that does not stop.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 213
Headnote: on the theme of the cuckoo among the trees.
The topic is the bird heard within a grove, and the poem sets what has passed against what is left.
Fujiwara no Yasusue was a poet of the late Heian period.
The time is summer; the place is the wood at Shinoda in Izumi Province, in what is now Izumi in Osaka.
The occasion was the set topic.
The first line is a flat statement of fact, the form that opens Jakuren's hundred and fifty-fifth poem in Book Two.
The second line fixes the place.
The third line gives the subject and completes the upper half of the poem.
The phrase in the fourth line means unceasing. As in Murasaki Shikibu's hundred and ninety-first poem, water falling from leaves is the matter; there it wetted one waiting, here one left behind.
The poem closes without a full stop. The bird is gone and only the dripping remains on the sleeve. The drops suggest tears, and the forlornness after a departure is entrusted to them. The hundred and fifty-fifth and hundred and fifty-sixth poems of Book Two took what remained after the flowers, and the same figure is here moved to a bird.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yasusue
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The cuckoo has cried and gone behind the ridgeline and that ridge is now more hateful to me than when it was the moon that went in
- 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
- What am I to do so many nights it has not come, the cuckoo, and just as I resolve to wait no more, a squall fills the sky
- There is a voice, yes choking on the roads of cloud the cuckoo, and are those its tears that come pouring in the squall of early night