白露の玉もて結へる籬の内に
光さへ添ふ常夏の花
光さへ添ふ常夏の花
- Roma-ji
-
Shiratsuyu no tama mote yueru mase no uchi ni hikari sae sou tokonatsu no hana
- English Translation
-
Bound with the white dew
as with jewels, the bamboo
fence, and within it
the light is added to them
the flowers of the wild pink
- Meaning
- Within the fence, that seems to have been plaited out of white dew like jewels, the pinks have light added to them as well.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 275
Headnote: on the theme of the pink thick with dew.
A run on flowers and dew begins here. The topic names the wild pink, also called the everlasting summer flower for its long blooming.
Retired Emperor Takakura (1161-1181) was the seventh son of Emperor Go-Shirakawa. Go-Shirakawa, poet of the hundred and forty-sixth piece, was his father, and Go-Toba, poet of the hundred and seventy-fifth and others, his son.
The time is summer; the place is a garden with a fence around it.
The occasion was the set topic.
The first two lines have the fence plaited out of dewdrops like beads. It is the phrasing of Shigeie's hundred and eighty-first poem, where a hedge was woven of white waves and the deutzia taken for them; here the dew does the plaiting.
The word in the third line names a fence loosely woven of bamboo or brushwood.
The particle in the fourth line marks addition: besides the whiteness of the dew, light as well.
The poem closes on a noun. The name given to the flower means the summer that does not end, from its long season. Dewdrops, light and the colour of the flowers are laid together, and the thickness of dew named in the topic becomes a richness of the eye.
- Author
- Retired Emperor Takakura
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- The white dew has laid its kindness on it, and those leaves, those words of it and dimly, faintly it showed the flower of the moonflower
- In the dusk I light a lamp at the reeds that stand beside my eaves, and an autumn not yet in ear speaks from underneath to me