重ねても涼しかりけり夏衣
薄き袂に宿る月影
薄き袂に宿る月影
- Roma-ji
-
Kasanete mo suzushikarikeri natsugoromo usuki tamoto ni yadoru tsukikage
- English Translation
-
Even folded twice
how cool it is, this summer
robe, for the moonlight
has come to lodge in the thin
cloth of the sleeve, and shines there
- Meaning
- Even worn double it is cool, this summer robe: the moonlight has lodged in its thin sleeve.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 260
Headnote: for a hundred-poem contest at his residence.
Poems on coolness follow. This one makes moonlight on a thin summer robe the source of the coolness. The headnote places it at Yoshitsune's hundred-poem contest, the gathering of the twenty-third and thirty-seventh poems of Book One and the two hundred and fifty-first of this book.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune; this is his fifth appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninth and others.
The time is a summer night; no place is given.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The first line means: even worn one over another. Layering should make one warmer, and the poem says it is cool all the same.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the second line marks the surprise.
The third line names the robe, the word used through the run on the change of clothes from the hundred and seventy-sixth to the hundred and seventy-ninth poems.
The fourth line names the thin sleeve, with the implication that it is thin even doubled.
The poem closes on a noun; the word used means light. The reason for the coolness turns out at the end to be not the thinness of the cloth but the moonlight lodged in it. Taking light as something felt on the skin is the method of Jien's two hundred and forty-second poem, where the orange's scent lay cool on a sleeve, and coolness is again conveyed by transposing one sense into another.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- At Kiyomi Bay the moon is unconcerned, and the gate of heaven is not open yet, and still the waves are whitening there
- Has the autumn come back again, for the coolness by the Hatsuse in the shade of the cedars along the old river bank
- By the roadside there clear water is running, and a willow's shadow and I stopped, meaning to stay only a little while there