Mizukuki no oka no kuzuha mo irozukite kesa urakanashi aki no hatsukaze

English Translation

On the hill the leaves
of the arrowroot have turned
their colour, and this
morning there is a sadness
in the first wind of autumn

Meaning

The arrowroot leaves on the hill have taken their colour, and this morning there is a vague sadness in the first wind of autumn.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 296

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
Following the run on dew, this poem knows autumn by the colouring of the arrowroot leaves. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The Monk Kensho was a scholar of poetry of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. Adopted by Fujiwara no Akisuke, he carried on the poetics of the Rokujo house and wrote commentaries. Akisuke, poet of the hundred and twenty-fourth piece in Book Two, was his adoptive father.
The time is a morning at the beginning of autumn; the place is a hill.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line is a pillow word attaching to the word for hill.
The second line names the object. The arrowroot appears in the two hundred and eighty-fifth poem that opens this book, where the sign was the turning of the leaves' undersides; here it is their change of colour. One plant announces the season by two different changes. The particle carries the sense of the leaves too.
The third line gives the change.
The prefix in the fourth line means the heart, and adds the sense of somehow, vaguely. In the opening poem the same sound meant the underside of a leaf; here it means the mind, and two words of one sound stand near the beginning of the book.
The poem closes with the same words as the two hundred and ninety-second and ninety-fifth, their third occurrence in this book. A visible sign, the colouring, is joined to a state of mind, and the run on early autumn is brought to a close.

Author

The Monk Kensho

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other