Satsukiyami mijikaki yowa no utatane ni hanatachibana no sode ni suzushiki

English Translation

In the dark of May
in a light sleep taken through
the short summer night
the orange blossom's fragrance
lies cool upon my sleeve here

Meaning

In the rainy dark of the fifth month, dozing through the short night, I find the orange blossom's scent lying cool on my sleeve.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 242

Headnote: from the time when he presented a fifty-poem sequence.
The fifth poem on orange blossom. Where the three before it took memory for their subject, this one takes the scent as coolness and keeps to the senses. The headnote assigns it to a fifty-poem sequence.
The poet, given as former Archbishop, is Jien, a son of the Regent Fujiwara no Tadamichi, four times abbot of the Tendai school. This is his second appearance in this book, after the hundred and seventy-seventh poem.
The time is a short night in the fifth month; the place is a bedchamber.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.

The first line names the moonless dark of the fifth-month rains, the word used in the hundred and ninety-fourth poem.
The second line names the shortness of a summer night, so that the season is near midsummer.
The word in the third line means a light sleep taken without properly going to bed, used in Tsunenobu's hundred and ninety-seventh poem.
The fourth line brings in the scent. Princess Shokushi's two hundred and fortieth poem set the orange at a dreaming pillow, and this one likewise joins sleep to fragrance.
The poem ends on an attributive form. Scent belongs to smell, and it is taken up here by a word of touch. The transposition of one sense into another gives a single point of comfort in a dark, short night. The orange, which has stood through this run for memory, is treated here as sensation, and the poem differs from its neighbours in that.

Author

Jien

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other