Fushimiyama matsu no kage yori miwataseba akuru tanomo ni akikaze zo fuku

English Translation

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

Meaning

Looking out from the shade of the pines on Fushimi hill, I see the autumn wind blowing over the paddies as the day breaks.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 291

Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The seventh poem on the autumn wind, on looking out over the fields at daybreak. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei, compiler of the Senzai Wakashu and father of Teika. He appears in Book One from the fifth poem onward, in Book Two from the hundredth, and in Book Three from the two hundred and first.
The time is daybreak at the beginning of autumn; the place is Fushimi hill in Yamashiro Province, in what is now Fushimi ward in Kyoto.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line raises the place. The poem that follows also names Fushimi, but that is understood to be the Fushimi in Yamato, a different place of the same name.
The second line means from the shade of the pines, taking up the pines of the previous poem.
The third line throws the view wide open; it is the opening of Go-Toba's thirty-sixth poem in Book Two.
The fourth line names the surface of the paddies, and the verb has the day coming up, so that time is moving.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. Looking out from dark shade over fields growing light sets dark against bright and a narrow vantage against a wide one, the arrangement of the thirty-fifth poem in Book One, which looked at a sunset through a gap in haze.

Author

Fujiwara no Shunzei

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other