鳴く蝉の声も涼しき夕暮に
秋をかけたる森の下露
秋をかけたる森の下露
- Roma-ji
-
Naku semi no koe mo suzushiki yūgure ni aki o kaketaru mori no shitatsuyu
- English Translation
-
Even the crying
of the cicadas is cool
at this evening hour
and the dew beneath the trees
already promises fall
- Meaning
- At this hour even the cicadas' crying sounds cool, and the dew under the trees has autumn in it already.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 271
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, from the time when she presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The second poem on cicadas and autumn. Where the previous poem carried the insects' tears to the leaves, this one finds autumn in the dew beneath the trees. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Nijoin no Sanuki was a daughter of Minamoto no Yorimasa and served Emperor Nijo. This is her second appearance in this book, after the two hundred and thirty-seventh poem. Yorimasa, poet of the two hundred and sixty-seventh, was her father.
The time is an evening at the end of summer; the place is a wood.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line repeats the previous poem's words, so that two pieces on one subject stand together.
The particle in the second line carries the sense of even the voice. To call a sound cool is to transpose one sense into another, the method of the two hundred and forty-second and sixtieth poems.
The third line gives the hour.
The verb in the fourth line means to hang a thing in the mind, and also to connect one thing with another: it is still summer, and already there is a link with autumn.
The poem closes on a noun. The previous poem set the lower leaves near its close and this one the dew beneath the trees; both look for the sign of the season low down, under the branches. Dew belongs to autumn, so that its presence in a summer wood is itself an anticipation.
- Author
- Nijoin no Sanuki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Where the fireflies fly through the roots of the thick reeds of the marshy field night by night beneath them goes the wind of autumn, unseen