いかばかり身にしみぬらん七夕の
妻待つ宵の天の河風
妻待つ宵の天の河風
- Roma-ji
-
Ikabakari mi ni shiminuramu tanabata no tsuma matsu yoi no ama no kawakaze
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- How it must go through her: the wind off the River of Heaven, on the evening when the Weaver waits for her lord.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 322
Headnote: when he wrote a hundred poems at his residence.
The tenth poem on Tanabata, imagining from the star's side how cold the wind is during the wait. The headnote places it among a hundred poems written at his own house.
The poet, given by his titles as a lay monk, is Fujiwara no Kanezane, who served as Regent and Chancellor and left the diary Gyokuyo. In Book Three he is the poet of the two hundred and thirty-first and two hundred and eightieth poems. Yoshitsune, poet of the two hundred and ninety-third and others, was his son.
The time is the evening of the seventh day of the seventh month; the place is in heaven.
The occasion was the writing of the hundred poems.
The first line is an adverb of degree: how much? Ise no Taifu's two hundred and twenty-seventh poem in Book Three opens the same way, imagining the field workers out in the rain; there the object of the sympathy is a person on earth, here a star in the sky.
The phrase in the second line means to be felt to the bone, the words used in Kunaikyo's two hundred and eighty-first poem in Book Three; an auxiliary of present conjecture follows.
The third line names the Weaver.
The fourth line takes up the waiting of Tsurayuki's three hundred and thirteenth poem. The two share the phrase, and where that poem gave a solitary bed on earth, this gives a waiting in heaven.
The poem closes on a noun. A wind off the River of Heaven simply transfers to the sky the wind that comes off a river on earth. After the three hundred and nineteenth poem, in which the wind might spoil the meeting, it appears here as something that torments the one who waits.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kanezane
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- On the mulberry leaves of the boat that crosses over to her, how many autumns have written letters of dew there, I ask
- 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
- 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
- Their meeting is not broken off: the river of heaven, and in what autumn was it that they first began to make the crossing