Yūdachi no kumo mo tomaranu natsu no hi no katabuku yama ni higurashi no koe

English Translation

Not one cloud of the
summer squall has stayed behind
and as the day sinks
behind the hills, the crying
of the evening cicadas

Meaning

Not a cloud of the squall remains, and as the summer sun goes down behind the hills, the evening cicadas are crying.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 268

Headnote: from among a hundred poems.
The poem stands at the turn from summer squalls to the evening cicada. Cloud and sun both go, and only a voice is left. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her fifth appearance in this book, after the hundred and eighty-second, two hundred and fifteenth, fortieth and fifty-sixth poems.
The time is sundown in summer; the place is the hills.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The cicada named here sings at morning and evening from late summer into autumn.

The first two lines mean that not even the squall's cloud stays; the particle carries the sense of the cloud too, and what it says extends to the sun below. It takes up Kintsune's two hundred and sixty-fifth poem, in which a bank of cloud went by.
The third line names the summer sun. Cloud and sun stand together as two things that depart.
The fourth line gives the hills the sun is sinking behind.
The poem closes on a noun. The cloud has gone, the day is going, and a voice is what remains. The form of the cuckoo poems earlier in this book, where a voice was the only evidence, is carried over here to a cicada. That summer is near its end is stated by the cry, and the poem hands the subject on to the next.

Author

Princess Shokushi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other