Misogi suru kawa no se mireba karakoromo himo yūgure ni nami zo tachikeru

English Translation

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

Meaning

Looking at the shallows where the purification is made, I find that as the day draws to evening the waves are rising.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 284

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for a screen of the months in the Engi era.
This poem closes Book Three, the summer poems. It takes the purification held at the end of the sixth month and so brings the season to a close. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Ki no Tsurayuki compiled the Kokin Wakashu and wrote its Japanese preface. In Book One he is the poet of the fourteenth and eighty-first poems and in Book Two of the hundred and eighth and others; this is his first appearance in this book.
The time is an evening at the end of the sixth month; the place is a river shallows.
The occasion was the screen of the months.
At the end of the sixth month a purification was held, in which people washed in a river to be rid of the defilement of the half year. It was the last observance of summer, which is why this poem stands at the end of the book.

The first line names the rite.
The second line means: looking at the shallows of the river. The word is the one used in the two hundred and seventeenth and fifty-third poems.
The third line names a fine imported robe, and works almost as a pillow word leading into the next line. It also sounds the verb for cutting cloth, which belongs with it.
The word opening the fourth line means the sun as well, and at the same time the cord of a garment, the same pivot as in Kiyosuke's two hundred and sixty-fourth poem, supported here by the robe above. At such purifications clothes were removed, and paper figures were sometimes floated away.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive form at the close. The verb means that waves are rising, and through the robe above it also carries the sense of cutting cloth. Garment, day and wave are folded into a single set of sounds, and the summer book closes on a highly worked poem.

Author

Ki no Tsurayuki

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other