時鳥雲居のよそに過ぎぬなり
晴れぬ思ひの五月雨の頃
晴れぬ思ひの五月雨の頃
- Roma-ji
-
Hototogisu kumoi no yoso ni suginu nari harenu omoi no samidare no koro
- English Translation
-
The cuckoo has passed
far off beyond the cloudland
so it seems, and here
my thoughts do not clear at all
in the season of long rain
- Meaning
- The cuckoo seems to have passed by, far off beyond the clouds, in this season of long rain when my thoughts will not clear.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 236
Headnote: among the summer poems he offered to the Great Shrine.
The second poem pairing the long rains with the cuckoo. The bird passes at a distance and the heart does not lift. The headnote assigns it to poems offered at the Ise Shrine.
The poet, given as Retired Emperor, is Go-Toba; this is his second appearance in this book, after the hundred and seventy-fifth poem.
The time is the season of long rains; no place is given.
The occasion was the offering of the poems.
The first line names the bird.
The word in the second line means the sky where clouds are, and by extension a place far removed, as in Suo no Naishi's two hundred and fifth poem. There a single cry was heard from that distance; here the bird passes without being heard at all.
The auxiliary in the third line marks inference: so it appears. As in Yasusue's two hundred and thirteenth poem, the bird is noticed only after it has gone.
The fourth line names a mind that does not clear. The verb serves both for cloud lifting and for a heart lightening, and belongs with the rains below.
The poem closes on a noun. A sky that will not clear and a mind that will not clear are joined in one word, and the weather is made a vessel for feeling.
- Author
- Go-Toba In
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Through the long rain's clouds the moon is beginning now to break clear, and it had been waiting a short while for that, the cuckoo, and calls
- Who will there be then to remember, at the scent of orange blossom once I too have come to be one of the people of old