いかばかり田子の裳裾もそほつらん
雲間も見えぬ頃の五月雨
雲間も見えぬ頃の五月雨
- Roma-ji
-
Ikabakari tago no mosuso mo sohotsuramu kumoma mo mienu koro no samidare
- English Translation
-
How wet must they be
the trailing skirts of the men
working in the fields
in a season when no break
in the cloud shows, and rain falls
- Meaning
- How soaked the field workers' skirts must be, in this season of long rain when not a gap shows in the cloud.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 227
Headnote: topic unknown.
The third poem on the long rains, imagining the field workers out in them. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Ise no Taifu was a lady-in-waiting and poet of the mid-Heian period, a daughter of Onakatomi no Sukechika, in the service of Empress Shoshi. The Mother of Prince Yasusuke, poet of the fiftieth poem in Book One and the hundred and eighteenth in this one, was her daughter.
The time is the season of long rains; the place is the fields.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line is an adverb of degree: how much?
The second line names those who work in the fields and the trailing hem of their clothes; the particle carries the sense of even their skirts.
The verb in the third line means to be soaked through, with an auxiliary of present conjecture: not seen, but reasoned out.
The fourth line means that not even a break in the cloud is visible. The hundred and eightieth and two hundred and tenth poems gave a moon between clouds; here there is no such gap, and the absence of clear sky measures the length of the rain.
The poem closes on a noun. Where the two poems before it took objects, a rope and a conduit, this one takes people, and within the run on the fields the subject shifts from implements to those who use them.
- Author
- Ise no Taifu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Where they take the shoots the pipe in the mountain field has sprung a leak now and along the sacred rope the drops are spilling over
- On the small hill fields the rope they have drawn along stretches out and out and is it rotting away in the season of long rain
- At Mishima Bay the wild rice in the inlet when the rain comes down droops the lower for it, and there is nobody to cut it
- Where they cut wild rice the marsh water at Yodo is deep, and even to the bottom of it, clear the light of the moon has come