夕暮は荻吹く風の音まさる
今はたいかに寝覚めせられん
今はたいかに寝覚めせられん
- Roma-ji
-
Yūgure wa ogi fuku kaze no oto masaru ima hata ika ni nezame seraremu
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- At evening the wind in the reeds sounds louder; and how, tonight, shall I be woken from my sleep?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 303
Headnote: topic unknown.
A run on the wind in the reeds begins here. From the sound at evening the poet foresees waking in the night. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The poet, given by his court title, is Prince Tomohira (964-1009), the seventh son of Emperor Murakami, who served as Minister of Central Affairs. He was learned in Chinese letters and held in high regard as a man of letters in his day.
The time is an evening in early autumn; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line gives the hour.
The second line names the wind blowing through reeds. The reed's broad leaves sound loudly in a wind, and it stands for the sound of autumn; it appears in the two hundred and eighty-sixth and ninety-eighth poems too.
The third line means that the sound grows stronger, so that the wind has risen with the evening.
The word in the fourth line means moreover, in addition: if it is like this at dusk, what will the night be?
The closing line joins a spontaneous auxiliary to one of conjecture: I shall be woken, whether I will or not. The poem foresees a waking in the night before the night has come, taking up its own future state as the hundred and ninety-ninth poem of Book Three took up a habit of waiting.
- Author
- Prince Tomohira
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- When the evening comes in the wind that blows across the set of the reeds for no reason I can name the tears have begun to fall
- Was there some promise between them, that the reed leaf should have come to be the one the wind of autumn first calls upon, as a wife