Waga yado no sotomo ni tateru nara no ha no shigemi ni suzumu natsu wa kinikeri

English Translation

Outside of my house
stands an oak, and in the shade
under its thick leaves
I take my ease in the cool
and so the summer has come

Meaning

In the thick leaves of the oak that stands outside my house I take the cool: summer has come.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 250

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The second poem on summer shade. Where the previous poem had the thickening leaves shut out the moon, this one takes the same thicket as a place to be cool in. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The Monk Egyo was a mid-Heian monk and poet. In Book Two he is the poet of the hundred and seventeenth poem.
The time is summer; the place is outside the poet's house.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The word in the second line means the outer side of a house, used also in Tadayoshi's two hundred and thirty-fourth poem.
The third line names the tree, a broad-leaved deciduous oak written of for the shade it casts.
The fourth line means taking the cool in the thick shade, and answers to the thickening of the previous poem.
The poem closes with the same words as Empress Jito's hundred and seventy-fifth, the opening piece of this book. There the season was known by a white robe; here it is known by the act of sitting in the shade. One ending serves the book's beginning and the run on shade, and the pattern of announcing a season returns.

Author

The Monk Egyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other