Fukakusa no tsuyu no yosuga o chigiri nite sato o ba karezu aki wa kinikeri

English Translation

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

Meaning

As though it had pledged itself by the dew of Fukakusa, autumn has come without ever leaving the village.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 293

Headnote: for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
A run on dew begins here. This poem has autumn coming as faithfully as ever to a village grown wild. The headnote assigns it to the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, a son of the Regent Fujiwara no Kanezane and author of the Japanese preface to the Shin Kokin Wakashu. He appears in Book One from the first poem, in Book Two from the hundred and thirty-sixth, and in Book Three from the two hundred and ninth.
The time is the beginning of autumn; the place is Fukakusa in Yamashiro Province, in what is now Fushimi ward in Kyoto, close to the ground of the two preceding poems, so that the place names run on.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
Fukakusa is the setting, in the Tales of Ise, of an exchange between a man leaving the village where he has long lived and the woman who stays. The sense of its name, a village deep in grass, has been written of together with that scene.

The first line raises the place, whose name, meaning deep grass, carries over into the abundance of dew.
The word in the second line means something relied on, a connection.
The third line means: as a pledge. The argument is that autumn comes by virtue of a bond made with the dew.
The verb in the fourth line means to leave; the object particle is voiced, which adds force. People may leave the village, and the season does not.
The poem closes with the words that end the two hundred and eighty-fifth, eighty-ninth and ninetieth, their fourth occurrence in this book. A season arriving unchanged at a village people have left is the situation of the hundred and forty-seventh and forty-eighth poems of Book Two, on villages the flowers had gone from.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other