Samidare no kumoma no tsuki no hareyuku o shibashi machikeru hototogisu kana

English Translation

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

Meaning

It had been waiting a little for the moon to come clear of the clouds of the long rain: the cuckoo.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 237

Headnote: on the theme of the cuckoo after rain, for the contest of the third month of 1201.
The third poem pairing the long rains with the cuckoo. The topic is the bird heard after rain, and the poem holds that it too was waiting for the rain to lift.
Nijoin no Sanuki was a daughter of Minamoto no Yorimasa and served Emperor Nijo; she was later active in Go-Toba's circle. In Book Two she is the poet of the hundred and thirtieth poem.
The time is a night when the long rain has lifted; no place is given.
The occasion was submission to the contest of the third month of 1201, from which Kintsune's seventy-second poem in Book One also comes.

The first two lines name the moon seen through a break in the cloud of the long rain, the phrase used in the hundred and eightieth and two hundred and tenth poems.
The third line means clearing little by little. Against the unclearing mind of the two hundred and thirty-sixth poem, this one gives a sky that is clearing, and the two make a pair.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the fourth line marks the recognition that something had been waiting. What waited was not a person but the bird.
The poem closes on a noun. Through the first half of this book people waited for the bird; here the bird has been waiting for the moon. Waiter and waited-for change places, and the subject of the run is closed by being reversed.

Author

Nijoin no Sanuki

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other