玉鉾の道行く人の言伝ても
絶えて程経る五月雨の空
絶えて程経る五月雨の空
- Roma-ji
-
Tamahoko no michi yuku hito no kotozute mo taete hodo furu samidare no sora
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Not even a message by someone travelling the road comes any more, and the days go by under this sky of long rain.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 232
Headnote: on the theme of the fifth-month rains.
The subject is the ceasing of traffic in the long rains. The headnote gives the rains as the topic.
Fujiwara no Teika was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. He appears in Book One from the thirty-eighth poem onward and in Book Two from the hundred and thirty-fourth; this is his first appearance in this book.
The time is the season of long rains; no place is given.
The occasion was the set topic.
The first line is a pillow word attaching to the word for road, used in Motozane's hundred and eighty-eighth poem and in Ietaka's hundred and thirteenth in Book Two.
The second line names those who travel the road. In the hundred and eighty-eighth poem they knotted the summer grass; here their passing has stopped altogether.
The word in the third line means a message entrusted to another; the particle carries the sense of not even that, so that neither a visit nor a word arrives.
The phrase in the fourth line means that the days pass, and the verb sounds the word for rain falling, so that it belongs with the long rains.
The poem closes on a noun. The subject of long rain stopping the work of people has run from the two hundred and twenty-sixth poem to the two hundred and thirty-first; here it appears as the severing of contact between people, and the theme passes from the decay of objects to human affairs.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Teika
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- In the long rains, will the wild rice on the river flats at Ou be left uncut, and rot away underneath the rising waves
- 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
- Where the bead-tree blooms the dew falls from the tree's shade outside of my house and the long rain has cleared off and a wind is going through