聞かずともここを瀬にせん時鳥
山田の原の杉の群立ち
山田の原の杉の群立ち
- Roma-ji
-
Kikazu tomo koko o se ni semu hototogisu Yamada no hara no sugi no muradachi
- English Translation
-
Though I do not hear
I will make this place my hope
cuckoo, here among
the stand of cedars that grows
on the plain of Yamada
- Meaning
- Even if I never hear it, I shall make this my place of hope: the stand of cedars on the plain at Yamada, cuckoo.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 217
Headnote: topic unknown.
Though the voice may never come, the poet will keep to the place. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The Monk Saigyo, whose lay name was Sato no Norikiyo, served Retired Emperor Toba as a guard of the northern quarters and took orders at twenty-three. In Book One he is the poet of the seventh, twenty-seventh, fifty-first, seventy-ninth and eighty-sixth poems, and in Book Two of the hundred and twenty-sixth.
The time is summer; the place is the plain of Yamada in Ise Province, the ground about the outer shrine, known for its great cedars.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The particle in the first line marks a concessive supposition: even if I do not hear it. Accepting failure in advance sets this poem apart from the others in the run.
The word in the second line means a shallows in a river, and by extension a thing relied on, a place of hope; the auxiliary expresses intention: I shall make this that place.
The third line names the bird.
The poem closes on nouns. The word for a stand of trees is the one used in Tsunenobu's hundred and twenty-second poem in Book Two.
The aim is not to obtain the voice but to settle on a place for waiting. Where the hundred and ninety-ninth poem made waiting a habit and the two hundred and fourth wore itself out with it, this one takes the waiting itself for a resting place.
- Author
- The Monk Saigyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Cuckoo, I find still I cannot think ill of you here in the evening outside the village, hearing you crying somewhere within
- The cuckoo has come out of the deep peaks at last and down at the foot of the nearer hills its voice comes falling and falling down
- Thatched with dwarf bamboo the round hut of poor folk, and its makeshift doorway opening at break of day where the cuckoo cries at dawn