この夕べ降りつる雨は彦星の
門渡る舟の櫂のしづくか
門渡る舟の櫂のしづくか
- Roma-ji
-
Kono yūbe furitsuru ame wa hikoboshi no to wataru fune no kai no shizuku ka
- English Translation
-
The rain that came down
this evening: is it the drops
off the Herdsman's oar
as he brings his boat across
the crossing of the river
- Meaning
- Was the rain that fell this evening the drops from the oar of the Herdsman's boat, as he crossed over?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 314
Headnote: topic unknown.
The second poem on Tanabata, taking the rain that fell on earth for drops from an oar in heaven. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Yamabe no Akahito was a Nara-period poet and one of the great figures of the Man'yoshu. In Book One he is the poet of the eleventh and twenty-ninth poems and in Book Two of the hundred and fourth and hundred and tenth.
The time is the evening of the seventh day of the seventh month; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first two lines state the plain fact, with a perfect auxiliary in the attributive form.
The third line turns to the sky.
The word in the fourth line means a narrows where a river is crossed. Putting a boat on the River of Heaven belongs with Teika's two hundred and fifty-fourth poem in Book Three, which set cormorant boats there.
An interrogative particle closes the poem. Rain on earth is taken as the overflow of an event in heaven, so that the two are joined by one cause. The previous poem looked up from the ground and grieved at the distance; this one has drops from the sky reach the ground, and the two make a pair of separation and contact.
- Author
- Yamabe no Akahito
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
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