いづちとか夜は蛍の上るらん
行く方知らぬ草の枕に
行く方知らぬ草の枕に
- Roma-ji
-
Izuchi to ka yoru wa hotaru no noboruramu yukukata shiranu kusa no makura ni
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Where are they going, the fireflies that rise at night? And I, with grass for a pillow, do not know where I am bound.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 272
Headnote: composed on seeing fireflies rise into the air.
A run on fireflies begins here. They appeared already in the two hundred and fifty-fifth poem; here they are set in a night spent travelling. The headnote records that the poem was written on seeing them rise.
Mibu no Tadami, a son of Mibu no Tadamine, was a mid-Heian poet and one of the thirty-six immortals of poetry. In Book One he is the poet of the twelfth and seventy-eighth poems. Tadamine, poet of the two hundred and eighty-third, was his father.
The time is a summer night; the place is a field on a journey.
The occasion was the sight of the fireflies.
The word in the first line means to where; an interrogative particle follows and governs the auxiliary in the third line.
The second line names the insects.
The auxiliary in the third line expresses present conjecture. Fireflies rising high are taken to be climbing toward some destination.
The fourth line means not knowing where one is going. It can be read of the fireflies and of the poet at once, and in one phrase the traveller's own condition is laid over theirs.
The poem closes on a noun meaning a night's rest on a journey. A traveller lying on the ground and insects rising into the air are set against each other, and two conditions are given by direction, down and up.
- Author
- Mibu no Tadami
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Even the crying of the cicadas is cool at this evening hour and the dew beneath the trees already promises fall
- 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
- In the shade of hills where the hisagi trees grow secretly, all this while it had been blowing here the evening wind of autumn