うたた寝の朝けの袖にかはるなり
ならす扇の秋の初風
ならす扇の秋の初風
- Roma-ji
-
Utatane no asake no sode ni kawaru nari narasu ōgi no aki no hatsukaze
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Waking at daybreak from a doze, I find that at my sleeve one wind has given place to another: the fan I had grown used to, and now the first wind of autumn.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 308
Headnote: from among a hundred poems.
Two poems on fans follow. The conceit is that the wind of a fan used through the summer gives place to the first wind of autumn. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. She appears in Book One from the third poem, in Book Two from the hundred and first, and in Book Three from the hundred and eighty-second.
The time is daybreak in early autumn; the place is a bedchamber.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
Tadamine's two hundred and eighty-third poem in Book Three also set the fan that summer's ending puts aside beside autumn's white dew. The fan belongs to summer and is laid down at the start of autumn.
The word in the first line means a light sleep taken without properly going to bed, used repeatedly in Book Three from the hundred and ninety-seventh poem onward.
The word in the second line means daybreak, used in Suemichi's two hundred and eighty-seventh poem.
The auxiliary in the third line marks inference: so it appears. What has changed into what is not disclosed until the lines below.
The verb in the fourth line means to have grown used to a thing through handling it, and names the fan of the summer just past.
The poem closes on the noun that ends the two hundred and ninety-second, ninety-fifth, ninety-sixth and ninety-ninth poems, its fifth appearance in this book. An artificial wind gives place to a natural one, and the turn of the seasons is shown through an object at hand.
- Author
- Princess Shokushi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Till my hand was numb I plied the fan, and where I laid it down at last I have all but forgotten for the wind of autumn blows
- The wind of autumn blows and makes the dew, and yet there is not a blade of grass anywhere on which white dew does not lie scattered