秋近き気色の森に鳴く蝉の
涙の露や下葉染むらん
涙の露や下葉染むらん
- Roma-ji
-
Aki chikaki keshiki no mori ni naku semi no namida no tsuyu ya shitaba somuramu
- English Translation
-
In the wood that holds
the look of the coming fall
the cicadas cry
and is it the dew of their
tears that dyes the lower leaves
- Meaning
- In the wood that already looks like autumn the cicadas cry: is it the dew of their tears that is colouring the lower leaves?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 270
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
A run on cicadas and the nearness of autumn begins here. This poem has the insects' tears dyeing the lower leaves, catching the first sign of the turn. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune; this is his sixth appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninth and others.
The time is the end of summer; the place is a wood.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line states the subject. Taking up the evening cicadas of the poems before, it names the nearness of autumn outright.
The word in the second line means look or air, used in Princess Shokushi's eighty-third poem, and the phrase means a wood that already has the air of autumn.
The third line names the insects.
An interrogative particle in the fourth line governs the auxiliary at the close. Giving a cicada tears is the device of the daughter of Shunzei's hundred and fortieth poem in Book Two, where a flower wearied of the world.
The word in the closing line means the lower leaves of a tree, the first to turn, and the verb means to dye. In fact it is the season that colours them, and by assigning the cause to the insects' tears the poem binds their crying to the turning of the leaves.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Not one cloud of the summer squall has stayed behind and as the day sinks behind the hills, the crying of the evening cicadas
- The evening sun's light falls on the brushwood door of the hut, and how lone and desolate it all is the evening cicada's cry
- Even the crying of the cicadas is cool at this evening hour and the dew beneath the trees already promises fall
- Where do they go up the fireflies rising by night and I do not know where I am bound for either with grass here for my pillow