眺むれば衣手涼しひさかたの
天の河原の秋の夕暮
天の河原の秋の夕暮
- Roma-ji
-
Nagamureba koromode suzushi hisakata no ama no kawara no aki no yūgure
- English Translation
-
When I gaze at it
my sleeves are cool: the river
bed of heaven, far
in the sky, and the evening
that is falling in autumn
- Meaning
- Gazing at it, I find my sleeves gone cool: the riverbed of heaven, an autumn evening.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 321
Headnote: from among a hundred poems.
The ninth poem on Tanabata. Gazing at the River of Heaven turns the sleeves cold, so that a body on earth is joined to a sight in the sky. 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. This is her second appearance in this book, after the three hundred and eighth poem.
The time is the evening of the seventh day of the seventh month; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The verb in the first line means to gaze while lost in thought. In autumn poems its other sense, long rain, does not tell; but the two hundred and ninety-seventh and three hundred and twelfth poems also join looking to brooding, and in this book the two are laid together.
The word in the second line means sleeves, as in Ietaka's two hundred and ninety-second poem, where they were cold; here they are cool. That looking should chill the body is a transposition of sense, like the scent and light taken as coolness in the two hundred and forty-second and two hundred and sixtieth poems of Book Three.
The third line is a pillow word attaching to the word for heaven, used in the two hundred and fifty-fourth and sixty-sixth poems of Book Three.
The fourth line names the bed of the River of Heaven: since it is a river it must have a bed, so that a landscape of earth is given to the sky. It is the conception of the three hundred and seventeenth poem, which found waves there.
The poem closes on a noun. The festival belongs to the night, and this poem takes the evening before it: not the meeting but the waiting for it is the subject.
- Author
- Princess Shokushi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The hems of the robes of the Weaver: have a care and do not blow them back and turn them inside out you first wind of the autumn
- On the mulberry leaves of the boat that crosses over to her, how many autumns have written letters of dew there, I ask
- How it must go through and pierce them, on the evening when the Weaver waits for her lord, the wind that blows along heaven's river there
- On the evening when the two stars meet it is cool and the autumn wind is crossing over the bridge of maple leaves in heaven