みしぶつき植ゑし山田に引板はへて
また袖ぬらす秋は来にけり
また袖ぬらす秋は来にけり
- Roma-ji
-
Mishibu tsuki ueshi yamada ni hita haete mata sode nurasu aki wa kinikeri
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- In the hillside field I planted with the scum of the water still on me, I have strung the clappers now, and autumn has come to wet my sleeves again.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 301
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence to Retired Emperor Sutoku.
The turning of a whole year is given through the work of a field. The headnote refers to the Kyuan sequences of 1150, from which the thirteenth poem of Book One and the hundred and eighty-fifth and two hundred and sixty-fourth of Book Three also come.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei; this is his second appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninety-first poem.
The time is early autumn; the place is a field among the hills.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The clappers are boards hung from a rope drawn across a field and pulled to make a noise that drives off birds, used when the rice is ripening.
The word opening the poem names the reddish film that floats on standing water and gets onto hands and sleeves when one wades in to plant.
The second line means: in that hillside field where I set the shoots. A past auxiliary in the attributive form looks back to the planting in spring.
The verb in the third line means to draw out at length, the word used in Mototoshi's two hundred and thirtieth poem in Book Three. Time moves from the planting of spring to the scaring of birds in autumn.
The word in the fourth line means once again. In spring the sleeves were wet with water and mud, and in autumn with tears, and the contrast is carried by that single word.
The poem closes with the words that open this book, their fifth appearance here. The passage of a year is held in one poem, turning on the ordinary work of a field.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- But for a village below Tatsuta's hillside where the morning mist rises, who would ever know that the autumn had arrived
- At evening the sound of the wind through the reed beds grows louder, and now how am I to be woken out of sleep, and by what else