あはれいかに草葉の露のこほるらん
秋風たちぬ宮城野の原
秋風たちぬ宮城野の原
- Roma-ji
-
Aware ika ni kusaba no tsuyu no kooruramu akikaze tachinu Miyagino no hara
- English Translation
-
How they must freeze now
the dew upon the grass blades
for the autumn wind
has risen and gone abroad
over Miyagi's wide moor
- Meaning
- How the dew on the grass must be freezing there: the autumn wind has risen over the moor of Miyagi.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 300
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
Where the previous poem stated the wind's working, this one thinks of dew on a distant moor. The original gives neither a fresh headnote nor a fresh attribution.
The poet is the Monk Saigyo, as in the previous poem.
The time is early autumn; the place is the moor of Miyagi in Mutsu Province, in what is now Sendai, written of for its bush clover and its dew.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The exclamation opening the poem is followed by an adverb of degree. Michitomo's two hundred and ninety-fourth poem begins with the same exclamation, and the two stand near each other.
The second line names the object.
The auxiliary in the third line expresses present conjecture. It is still early autumn and the freezing of dew lies ahead, so that the poem imagines what is to come, as Ise no Taifu's two hundred and twenty-seventh poem in Book Three imagined field workers soaked in rain.
The fourth line means that the autumn wind has risen. That is the evidence: once the wind is up, the dew must freeze.
The poem closes on a noun. The poet is in the capital and his thought is on a moor far off in the north, and the poem carries the feeling of a place he has travelled to.
- Author
- The Monk Saigyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Until yesterday it hid itself out of sight the low reed, and now on the dew of its top leaves the wind of autumn blows on
- Even to a man who thinks of nothing at all and lets the world be it teaches the heart to feel the first wind of the autumn
- With the scum of pools still on me I set the shoots in the hillside field and I strung the clappers up and my sleeves are wet again
- But for a village below Tatsuta's hillside where the morning mist rises, who would ever know that the autumn had arrived