Koe wa shite kumoji ni musebu hototogisu namida ya sosoku yoi no murasame - Shin Kokin Wakashu(English Translation & Meaning)

声はして雲路にむせぶ時鳥
涙やそそく宵の村雨

Roma-ji: Koe wa shite kumoji ni musebu hototogisu namida ya sosoku yoi no murasame
English Translation: 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
Meaning: A voice, and nothing more: the cuckoo choking somewhere on the roads of cloud. Are those its tears, in this shower of early night?
Commentary: Book Three Summer Poems 215

Headnote: from a hundred-poem sequence she presented.
Like the previous poem this one takes a passing shower, but here the rain is the bird's tears. The two are placed together. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her second appearance in this book, after the hundred and eighty-second poem.
The time is early on a summer night; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line means that there is a voice and nothing else; the particle marks that nothing can be seen. The situation established at the hundred and ninetieth poem holds here too.
The word in the second line names a road through the clouds, used also in the sixtieth poem of Book One; the verb means to sob, to choke on one's own voice. A bird's call is taken for weeping.
The third line names it.
An interrogative particle in the fourth line governs a verb meaning to pour down, the word used in Shunzei's two hundred and second poem.
The poem closes on a noun. In the two hundred and first poem Shunzei refused the bird's tears; here the rain itself is taken for them, so that one word serves both refusal and conceit within a single book. Where the previous poem made the shower a sign of expectation, this one makes it the bird's weeping, and one scene is given two meanings.
Author: Princess Shokushi
Source: Shin Kokin Wakashu
Prev Poem: Ika ni semu konu yo amata no hototogisu mataji to omoeba murasame no sora
Next Poem: Hototogisu nao utomarenu kokoro kana na ga naku sato no yoso no yūgure