手もたゆくならす扇の置き所
忘るばかりに秋風ぞ吹く
忘るばかりに秋風ぞ吹く
- Roma-ji
-
Te mo tayuku narasu ōgi no okidokoro wasuru bakari ni akikaze zo fuku
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- I plied the fan until my hand ached; and now the autumn wind blows so that I have all but forgotten where I put it down.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 309
Headnote: topic unknown.
The second poem on fans. Where the previous poem gave the changing of one wind for another, this one says the fan itself has been forgotten. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Sagami was a lady-in-waiting and poet of the mid-Heian period; her dates are not recorded. She is known by that name from her marriage to Oe no Kinyori, governor of Sagami. In Book Three she is the poet of the two hundred and third poem.
The time is early autumn; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The adjective in the first line means weary, aching, and gives the tiredness of a summer spent working a fan.
The second line repeats the previous poem's words, so that two pieces share them and stand together.
The third line names the place where it was set down.
The particle in the fourth line marks degree: to the point of forgetting where. That the fan has been out of use for some while is given by the forgetting of its place.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close, the same ending as the two hundred and ninety-eighth poem. The previous poem caught the moment of exchange; this one gives a state some time after it, and between them the two mark the passage of time.
- Author
- Sagami
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- At the break of day when I look at the dew on the reeds' upper leaves there is a chill on the skin in the first wind of autumn