昨日だに問はんと思ひし津の国の
生田の森に秋は来にけり
生田の森に秋は来にけり
- Roma-ji
-
Kinō dani towamu to omoishi Tsu no kuni no Ikuta no mori ni aki wa kinikeri
- English Translation
-
Only yesterday
I was meaning to go there
and to Ikuta
the wood in Tsu no Kuni
the autumn has come before
- Meaning
- Only yesterday I meant to go and see it; and autumn has come already to the wood at Ikuta in Tsu.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 289
Headnote: from among a hundred poems.
The fifth poem on the autumn wind. Autumn arrives while the poet is still meaning to visit. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Fujiwara no Ietaka was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. He appears in Book One from the seventeenth poem onward, in Book Two from the hundred and thirteenth, and in Book Three from the two hundred and fourteenth.
The time is the beginning of autumn; the place is the wood at Ikuta in Settsu Province, in what is now Chuo ward in Kobe, known as the grove of the Ikuta shrine.
The occasion was the hundred-poem sequence.
The particle in the first line means at least, if nothing more. Where the two preceding poems used yesterday as a point of comparison, this one uses it as the day on which the poet had meant to go; three poems in succession put the same word to different work.
The second line joins an auxiliary of intention to a past auxiliary in the attributive form: he meant to and did not.
The third line names Settsu Province.
The fourth line fixes the place.
The poem closes with the same words as the two hundred and eighty-fifth. The season has turned before the visit could be made, as in Takatoki's eightieth poem in Book Two, where the days went by while the poet waited for blossom: the gap between human intention and the movement of the year is the subject.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Ietaka
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- In the single night I slept, it seems the autumn has come after all for the wind at daybreak here is not what it was before
- I have always heard this wind at the foot of hills or so I had thought and yet from yesterday it is changed, this wind off the slopes
- The wind that blows here has no colour to be seen and yet on the pines high on Takasago's peak the autumn has come at last
- From Fushimi hill looking out from the pine shade across the rice fields as the day comes up, the wind of autumn is blowing there