Shikitae no makura no ue ni suginu nari tsuyu o tazunuru aki no hatsukaze

English Translation

Over my pillow
spread with cloth, it has gone by
or so it would seem
in search of the dew, the first
wind of the autumn season

Meaning

It seems to have passed over my pillow: the first wind of autumn, come looking for the dew.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 295

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The third poem on dew. The autumn wind passes over the pillow in search of dew, and the dew is joined to the tears of the sleeve. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet is Minamoto no Tomochika, a son of Minamoto no Moromitsu. He appears in the fifty-seventh poem of Book One and the hundred and twenty-first of Book Two. Kunaikyo, poet of the fourth and seventy-sixth poems of Book One, was his sister.
The time is night or daybreak at the beginning of autumn; the place is a bedchamber.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line is a pillow word attaching to the word for pillow. It names the white cloth used for bedding, and from that attaches to pillows and to clothing.
The second line fixes the place.
The auxiliary in the third line marks inference from sound or from a sense of something passing. Knowing that an unseen thing has gone by is the form used again and again in the run on the cuckoo in Book Three.
The fourth line means coming in search of dew: the wind is given a purpose of its own. Taking up the dew of the sleeve in the previous poem, the dew on the pillow is understood as tears.
The poem closes with the same words as the two hundred and ninety-second. By making the wind come looking for tears, the arrival of autumn is presented as the beginning of grief.

Author

Minamoto no Tomochika

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other