うち湿りあやめぞ香る時鳥
鳴くや五月の雨の夕暮
鳴くや五月の雨の夕暮
- Roma-ji
-
Uchishimeri ayame zo kaoru hototogisu naku ya satsuki no ame no yūgure
- English Translation
-
Everything is damp
and the sweet flag gives its scent
and the cuckoo calls
in the rain of the fifth month
and the evening comes on now
- Meaning
- The damp draws the scent from the sweet flag, and the cuckoo calls: an evening of rain in the fifth month.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 220
Headnote: composed as a summer poem, when he had the company write sets of five.
The poem stands at the turn from the run on the cuckoo to the run on sweet flag, gathering cuckoo, sweet flag and the fifth-month rains into one piece. The headnote places it among sets of five poems.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune; this is his second appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninth poem.
The time is an evening in the season of long rains; no place is given.
The occasion was the writing of the five poems.
Sweet flag was laid on the eaves at the festival of the fifth day of the fifth month and used in scented medicine balls. Its strong scent was held to drive off harm.
The first line means grown damp; the prefix is merely rhythmic. Rain is not named, and only the dampness is set down first.
An emphatic particle in the second line governs the attributive verb: the wet draws out the scent, and cause and effect are held in two lines.
The third line names the bird, which appears once more at the point where its run hands over to the sweet flag.
The particle in the fourth line is exclamatory, and the phrase means the fifth month in which the cuckoo calls.
The poem closes on a noun. Smell, hearing and sight follow one another and the hour comes last. After the sudden showers of the two hundred and fourteenth and fifteenth poems, the long rains of the fifth month become the setting.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- And today again even the sweet flag's root, and the sound of my tears and the tangle grows the worse white jewels lying on my sleeve
- Not that I had tired of the flowers that have fallen but their many hues have stayed behind after all here upon your sleeve, I see