白露の情け置きけることのはや
ほのぼの見えし夕顔の花
ほのぼの見えし夕顔の花
- Roma-ji
-
Shiratsuyu no nasake okikeru koto no ha ya honobono mieshi yūgao no hana
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Are they the words the white dew left behind in kindness, these moonflowers that showed so faintly in the dusk?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 276
Headnote: composed on the moonflower.
The second poem on flowers and dew, seeing the flower as words the dew has left. The headnote gives the flower as the topic.
The poet is recorded only by the office of former Chancellor, and no settled identification exists. The two hundred and eleventh piece carries the same designation.
The time is a summer evening; no place is given.
The occasion was the set topic.
The moonflower opens white in the evening and closes by morning. In the Tale of Genji a scene turns on such a flower sent with a poem written beside it.
The first line names the dew, continuing from the previous poem so that the two are joined.
The word in the second line means kindness, or a feeling for beauty. The verb properly belongs to dew settling, and here it means that kindness was left behind: a word of the dew is turned on the heart.
The word in the third line means words, and its second element is the word for leaf, so that it belongs to plants as well. An interrogative particle follows: are these the words the dew has left?
The fourth line means dimly seen. The flower opens white at dusk and shows indistinctly in the half-light.
The poem closes on a noun. The flower is taken for a message, and behind that lies the custom of sending flowers with a poem. Where the previous poem treated dew as a richness for the eye, this one grants it a mind, and the handling differs.
- Author
- The Former Chancellor
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- In the shade of hills where the hisagi trees grow secretly, all this while it had been blowing here the evening wind of autumn
- 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
- 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
- Cloud is drifting now and the evening holds within itself the autumn and the wind has not come out in ear, above the reed beds