遠近には夕立すらし久方の
天の香具山雲隠れゆく
天の香具山雲隠れゆく
- Roma-ji
-
Tōchi ni wa yūdachi surashi hisakata no ama no kaguyama kumogakureyuku
- English Translation
-
Off in the distance
a shower must be falling
for the heavenly
Kaguyama is going
and hiding itself in cloud
- Meaning
- Somewhere off in the distance a squall must be falling: Ama-no-Kaguyama is disappearing into cloud.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 266
Headnote: composed on the theme of cloud coming between the eye and a distant view.
The fourth poem on summer squalls. The topic is cloud that blocks a distant view, and from a mountain vanishing into cloud the poet infers that rain is falling there.
The poet, given by his court title, is Minamoto no Toshiyori, a son of the Major Counsellor Minamoto no Tsunenobu. He compiled the Kin'yo Wakashu and wrote a treatise on poetry. In Book One he is the poet of the forty-third poem. Tsunenobu, poet of the hundred and ninety-seventh and others, was his father, and the Monk Shune of the sixth and hundred and forty-second his son.
The time is a summer evening; the place is within sight of Ama-no-Kaguyama.
The occasion was the set topic.
The word in the first line means far and near, and by extension a place at a distance; here it means the far ground.
The auxiliary in the second line expresses inference from evidence, and that evidence is the cloud of the lower lines. It is the construction of the hundred and seventy-fifth poem that opens this book and of the hundred and ninety-sixth.
The third line is a pillow word attaching to the word for heaven. In Teika's two hundred and fifty-fourth poem it led into the River of Heaven; here it takes its proper mountain.
The fourth line names one of the three mountains of Yamato, written of in the opening poem of this book and in the second poem of Book One, a hill that has served again and again to announce a season.
The poem closes with the mountain going into cloud. Reasoning from a visible sign to an unseen fact runs through this anthology; what marks this poem is that the sign is a thing ceasing to be visible.
- Author
- Minamoto no Toshiyori
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Of its own accord how cool it has become, this summer robe, whose cords are loosened in the evening after the rain has gone by
- Dew clings to the leaves of the bamboo grass, and now they bend all as one and a single bank of it has passed, the cloud of the squall
- The garden's surface has not yet dried, and even so, as if nothing had happened, in the squall's sky the moon is shining, and clear
- Not one cloud of the summer squall has stayed behind and as the day sinks behind the hills, the crying of the evening cicadas