明けぬるか衣手寒し菅原や
伏見の里の秋の初風
伏見の里の秋の初風
- Roma-ji
-
Akenuru ka koromode samushi Sugawara ya Fushimi no sato no aki no hatsukaze
- English Translation
-
Has the day broken
my sleeves are cold: Sugawara
and Fushimi, where
in the village blows the first
wind of the autumn season
- Meaning
- Has the day broken? My sleeves are cold. The first wind of autumn in the village of Fushimi at Sugawara.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 292
Headnote: from the fifty poems set by Cloistered Prince Shukaku.
The eighth poem on the autumn wind, again on the wind at daybreak. The headnote assigns it to a set of fifty poems commissioned by Cloistered Prince Shukaku, a son of Emperor Go-Shirakawa and abbot of Ninna-ji; the thirty-eighth and fortieth poems of Book One and the two hundred and forty-seventh of Book Three come from the same set.
The poet is Fujiwara no Ietaka; this is his second appearance in this book, after the two hundred and eighty-ninth poem.
The time is daybreak at the beginning of autumn; the place is the village of Fushimi at Sugawara, understood to be in Yamato and distinct from the Fushimi hill of the previous poem.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The particle in the first line is interrogative: has it grown light? The scene is of someone woken by cold while it is still dark.
The word in the second line means a sleeve. Feeling the cold on the skin comes before any judgement about the hour. The previous poem knew the dawn by sight; this one knows it by touch.
The particle in the third line is exclamatory, and the place name fixes the ground.
The fourth line narrows the place further. The same name occurs in two poems running, and they are set together.
The poem closes on a noun. The phrase names the first autumn wind of the year, and it recurs at the close of the two hundred and ninety-fifth and ninety-sixth poems as well, so that it becomes the ending of this run on early autumn.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Ietaka
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- On the dew alone of Fukakusa it makes its bond, and it will not leave this village of mine the autumn, which has come now
- How am I to bear the thought of it again, the dew upon my sleeve and in the wind off the moor the autumn has come to me