夏衣かたへ涼しくなりぬなり
夜や更けぬらん行き合ひの空
夜や更けぬらん行き合ひの空
- Roma-ji
-
Natsugoromo katae suzushiku narinu nari yo ya fukenuramu yukiai no sora
- English Translation
-
My summer robe is
cool along one side, it seems
and has the night grown
late, then, in the sky where these
two seasons come to meet now
- Meaning
- One side of my summer robe has turned cool. Has the night grown late? It is the sky where summer and autumn meet.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 282
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The fourth poem on the end of summer, catching the boundary of the seasons by the coolness of one side of a robe. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
The poet, given as former Archbishop, is Jien; this is his sixth appearance in this book, after the hundred and seventy-seventh and others.
The time is the last night of summer; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The phrase in the last line names the sky in which summer and autumn meet, the turn between the seasons at the end of the sixth month and the beginning of the seventh.
The first line names the robe, the word used in the run on the change of clothes from the hundred and seventy-sixth to the hundred and seventy-ninth poems and again in the two hundred and sixtieth and sixty-fourth: the same garment is written of at the beginning of this book and at its end.
The word in the second line means one side. Only half the robe is cool, so that the season has reached half the body. As in the two hundred and eighty-first poem, the word for one side of a thing is used in successive pieces.
The auxiliary closing the third line marks inference: so it appears.
In the fourth line an interrogative particle stands with an auxiliary of present conjecture. The coolness is ascribed to the lateness of the night, though it is in fact the turning of the season, and the mistake is corrected in the line below.
The poem closes on a noun. The phrase for the meeting of the seasons discloses at the end the true reason for the coolness. Near the close of the book, the change of seasons itself becomes the subject.
- Author
- Jien
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Drawing from the rock spring, over the dwarf bamboo the jewels spill, and here and there it is forming the evening dew of autumn
- With one branch put out the wild pear of Ou stands and whether or not the fruit sets, and the fall comes the wind goes through me alike
- The fan of summer ending, and the white dew of autumn: which of them will be the first to be laid down, I wonder, of the two
- Where the rites are done I look at the river's shoals and, robe of Cathay as the day goes down and cords are loosed, the waves are rising