たそかれの軒端の荻に灯すれば
ほに出でぬ秋ぞ下に言問ふ
ほに出でぬ秋ぞ下に言問ふ
- Roma-ji
-
Tasogare no nokiba no ogi ni tomosureba ho ni idenu aki zo shita ni kototou
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- At dusk I light the lamp by the reeds at my eaves, and an autumn that has not yet come into ear speaks to me from below.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 277
Headnote: from among a hundred poems.
Two poems on the reed follow. The plant comes into ear in autumn, and the sound of it was held to announce the season. The headnote assigns the poem to a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her sixth appearance in this book, after the hundred and eighty-second and others.
The time is dusk at the end of summer; the place is the eaves of a house.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line names dusk, the word used in Hachijoin no Takakura's two hundred and eighth poem.
The second line names the edge of the eaves, used in the two hundred and forty-third poem, and the reed, a plant written of as growing close to a house.
The third line means: when I light the lamp. An everyday act at the failing of the light is set down.
The phrase in the fourth line means both to come into ear and to show on the surface. It belongs with the reed, and it binds together a reed not yet in ear and an autumn not yet visible. An emphatic particle follows.
The verb at the close means to speak to; the word before it means what is underneath, out of sight. An autumn that has not yet appeared speaks from where it cannot be seen, the pattern of the two hundred and seventy-third and seventy-fourth poems, which found the season in hidden places.
- Author
- Princess Shokushi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- At the mountain house the rain cloud on the summit has broken away and the evening is cool now with dew beneath the cypress