五月雨の雲の絶え間を眺めつつ
窓より西に月を待つかな
窓より西に月を待つかな
- Roma-ji
-
Samidare no kumo no taema o nagametsutsu mado yori nishi ni tsuki o matsu kana
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- I keep watching for a break in the clouds of the long rain, and from my window I wait for the moon to come out in the west.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 233
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, on the theme of the fifth-month rains.
The poem waits for the moon through a gap in the clouds of the long rain. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Arakida no Ujiyoshi served as a priest of the Ise Shrine; his dates are not recorded.
The time is a night in the season of long rains; the place is a window in the poet's house.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first two lines name a break opened in the cloud of the long rain. Where Ise no Taifu's two hundred and twenty-seventh poem said that no such gap showed, this one waits for one.
The verb in the third line means to gaze while lost in thought, and is a homophone for long rain. The same play appears in Gyokei's sixty-fourth poem in Book One and Princess Shokushi's hundred and forty-ninth in Book Two, and in a poem about the fifth-month rains both senses tell. A continuative particle keeps the watching going.
The fourth line names a direction, west, from a window. Naming a compass point is uncommon in this poetry, and it adds the particular sense of watching where the moon will rise; the word for window is also rare in verse.
The poem closes on an exclamatory particle. After a long run in the first half of this book spent waiting for the cuckoo, the waiting continues here with the moon in the bird's place.
- Author
- Arakida no Ujiyoshi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- In these rains the moon is indifferent, and out of the deep mountains there comes out, all on its own one cuckoo, and nothing more