秋来ぬと松吹く風も知らせけり
かならず荻の上葉ならねど
かならず荻の上葉ならねど
- Roma-ji
-
Aki kinu to matsu fuku kaze mo shirasekeri kanarazu ogi no uwaha naranedo
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- The wind in the pines has told me too that autumn has come: it need not always be by the reeds' upper leaves.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 306
Headnote: topic unknown.
The fourth poem on the wind in the reeds. It holds that autumn is not announced by the reed alone, and so widens the view of the three poems before it. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The poet served Shichijoin, the mother of Retired Emperor Go-Toba; little else is recorded.
The time is early autumn; the place is where pines grow.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line quotes the announcement of the season that has run through this book since its opening, put here into reported form.
The second line names the object, with a particle carrying the sense of the pine's wind too. Pine is evergreen and does not change colour, and in the two hundred and ninetieth poem it was treated as a tree by which autumn is hard to know; here its wind does the telling.
An exclamatory auxiliary follows in the third line.
The fourth and fifth lines mean: not necessarily by the reeds' upper leaves. The received idea that the reed is the plant of the autumn wind is set in perspective. Shunzei's three hundred and fifth poem asked after the bond between reed and wind; this one denies that the bond is necessary, and the two make a pair.
The word for upper leaves names the same part of the plant as the leaf-tips of the two hundred and ninety-eighth poem.
- Author
- Shichijoin no Gon no Taifu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Waking from a doze at daybreak I find my sleeve has changed, it would seem from the fan I used to ply to the first wind of autumn