五月雨は麻生の川原の真菰草
刈らでや波の下に朽ちなん
刈らでや波の下に朽ちなん
- Roma-ji
-
Samidare wa Ou no kawara no makomogusa karade ya nami no shita ni kuchinamu
- English Translation
-
In the long rains, will
the wild rice on the river
flats at Ou be
left uncut, and rot away
underneath the rising waves
- Meaning
- In these long rains, will the wild rice on the flats at Ou be left uncut and rot away under the water?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 231
Headnote: when he had a hundred poems written.
The third poem on wild rice. Taking up the two hundred and twenty-eighth, in which no one came to cut it, this one supposes that it will rot where it stands. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
The poet, given by his titles as a lay monk, is Fujiwara no Kanezane (1149-1207). He served as Regent and Chancellor and left the diary Gyokuyo. He is named in the headnotes to the fifth poem of Book One and the two hundred and first of this book, and Yoshitsune, poet of the two hundred and ninth among others, was his son.
The time is the season of long rains; the place is the river flats at Ou.
The occasion was the writing of the hundred poems.
The first line gives the cause first: because of the long rains.
The second line fixes the place; the name means a stand of hemp, the word used in Taikenmon-in no Aki's hundred and eighty-fifth poem.
The third line names the plant, the same as in the two hundred and twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth poems, so that three pieces stand together.
In the fourth line a negative connective and an interrogative particle give the sense: left uncut, will it then? It takes up the absence of cutters in the two hundred and twenty-eighth poem.
The close joins a perfect auxiliary to one of conjecture: it will rot away. It is the form of the two hundred and twenty-sixth poem, which supposed the rope had rotted, and the subject of things left beyond human reach and decaying in the long rain passes here from a rope to a plant.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kanezane
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Through the long rain's clouds I watch for a break, and watch and from my window toward the west I go on now waiting for the moon to come