荻の葉も契ありてや秋風の
音づれそむるつまとなりけん
音づれそむるつまとなりけん
- Roma-ji
-
Ogi no ha mo chigiri arite ya akikaze no otozuresomuru tsuma to narikemu
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Is there some bond between them, that the reed leaf should be the first thing the autumn wind comes calling on?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 305
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence to Retired Emperor Sutoku.
The third poem on the wind in the reeds. It asks why the autumn wind should visit the reed first, and finds a bond between them. The headnote assigns it to the Kyuan sequences, as the three hundred and first poem is.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei; this is his third appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninety-first and three hundred and first poems.
The time is early autumn; the place is where reeds grow.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The particle in the first line carries the sense of the reed leaf too: among all growing things, it is the reed that has been chosen, and that is the question.
The word in the second line names a bond carried over from a former life, with an interrogative particle governing the auxiliary at the close. A Buddhist idea is brought to bear on the relation between a plant and the wind.
The verb in the third and fourth lines means both to make a sound and to pay a visit; the suffix after it means to begin. The wind's rustling of the leaves is taken as a call paid.
The word at the close means an occasion, a beginning, and it also carries the sound of the word for wife, which chimes with the bond named in the second line and allows the relation of wind and reed to be read as one between lovers. The final auxiliary expresses past conjecture.
The poem answers the question of why the reed should be the plant of the autumn wind by naming a bond. Where the three hundred and third and fourth poems spoke from the side of one moved by the sound, this one asks after the relation itself.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Autumn has come, and the wind that blows in the pines has told me so too and it is not always by the upper leaves of the reeds
- As the days go by the sound of it only grows in Izumi, where the thousand boughs of the grove at Shinoda take the wind