Musubu te ni kage midareyuku yama no i no akade mo tsuki no katabukinikeru

English Translation

In my cupped hands' hold
the reflected light breaks up
in the mountain well
and before I had my fill
the moon had gone down and set

Meaning

The moon's reflection scatters in the mountain spring each time I cup my hands; and before I had my fill of it the moon had sunk.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 258

Headnote: from the time when he presented a fifty-poem sequence.
A run on clear water and coolness begins here. This poem takes the moon reflected in a mountain spring. The headnote assigns it to a fifty-poem sequence.
The poet, given as former Archbishop, is Jien; this is his fourth appearance in this book, after the hundred and seventy-seventh, two hundred and forty-second and two hundred and fifty-first poems.
The time is a summer night; the place is a spring in the hills, a shallow pool among the mountains.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The model is Ki no Tsurayuki's poem in the Kokin Wakashu about a mountain spring clouded by the drops from cupped hands, and a parting from someone before one has had one's fill.

The verb in the first line means to take water up in the hands, and the line is the model's own.
The second line has the moon's reflection breaking up. Where the model speaks of the water clouding, this poem substitutes the scattering of the light: a matter of touch becomes a matter of sight only.
The third line is again the model's.
The fourth line means without having had enough, also the model's word. There it governed a parting from a person; here it governs the setting of the moon, so that a poem of separation becomes a poem of a summer night.
An exclamatory auxiliary at the close marks the realisation that the moon had sunk unobserved. The night has passed while the poet cupped water, and the shortness of a summer night is at work again.

Author

Jien

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other