Niwa no omo wa tsuki moranu made narinikeri kozue ni natsu no kage shigeritsutsu

English Translation

The garden's surface
has come to be a place where
no moonlight gets through
for the summer shade grows thick
and thicker in the branches

Meaning

The garden has come to be a place the moonlight cannot reach, the summer shade thickening on in the branches overhead.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 249

Headnote: topic unknown.
A run on summer shade and coolness begins here. This poem finds the leaves grown thick enough to shut out the moon. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Retired Emperor Shirakawa was the eldest son of Emperor Go-Sanjo and began the rule of the cloistered sovereigns after his abdication. This is his third appearance in this book, after the hundred and eightieth and hundred and ninety-eighth poems.
The time is summer; the place is the poet's garden.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The word in the first line means a surface, and the view is from the ground looking up.
The second line means to the point where no moonlight comes through, with a particle marking degree. It is the conceit of Yoshitada's hundred and eighty-sixth poem, that the moon's light comes rarely; there it was stated from the moon's side and here from the garden's.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the recognition that it has happened unobserved.
The fourth line names what does the shutting out.
The word in the fifth line means the shade of trees, and a continuative particle leaves the poem open, with the thickening still going on. The passage from flowers to leaves is measured by how much moonlight is kept out.

Author

Retired Emperor Shirakawa

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other