玉柏茂りにけりな五月雨に
葉守の神の標延ふるまで
葉守の神の標延ふるまで
- Roma-ji
-
Tamakashiwa shigerinikeri na samidare ni hamori no kami no shime haburu made
- English Translation
-
The oak has grown thick
how thick it has grown, this year
in the long rains, till
the god who guards its leaves has
drawn his rope across it all
- Meaning
- How thick the oak has grown in the long rains, until the god who guards its leaves has drawn his rope about it.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 230
Headnote: on the theme of trees growing thick in the rain.
The topic is the thickening of trees in rain. Through the long rains the oak has grown until the god has marked it off as his own.
Fujiwara no Mototoshi (1060-1142) was a poet of the late Heian period and the teacher in poetry of Fujiwara no Shunzei. A poem by him also appears in Book Nine, at the eight hundred and seventy-eighth.
The time is the season of long rains; the place is where oaks grow.
The occasion was the set topic.
A god was said to dwell in the oak and guard its leaves, and the belief was often written of in poetry.
The prefix in the first line is honorific, and the word names the oak.
The second line repeats the form of Motozane's hundred and eighty-eighth poem on the thickening of summer grass, with an exclamatory particle after the perfect auxiliary so that the surprise comes through directly. A phrase used in the run on grasses is here applied to a tree.
The third line gives the rain as the cause of the growth.
The fourth line names the god held to guard the leaves of the oak.
The verb at the close means to draw out at length, and the particle marks degree: it has grown until the god has marked it as his own. The same implement that people drew across their fields in the two hundred and twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth poems appears here as a god's. Human ropes rot in the rain, and the god's rope is drawn by it.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Mototoshi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- In the long rains, will the wild rice on the river flats at Ou be left uncut, and rot away underneath the rising waves
- Along the jewelled road, even word sent by those who pass has broken off, and the days go by now under a sky of long rain