星合の夕べ涼しき天の河
紅葉の橋を渡る秋風
紅葉の橋を渡る秋風
- Roma-ji
-
Hoshiai no yūbe suzushiki ama no kawa momiji no hashi o wataru akikaze
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- On the cool evening of the stars' meeting, the autumn wind goes across the bridge of maple leaves over the River of Heaven.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 323
Headnote: on the theme of Tanabata.
The eleventh poem on Tanabata. The bridge over the River of Heaven is made of maple leaves, and the wind crosses it. The headnote gives the festival as the topic.
The poet, given by his court title, is Saionji no Kintsune, who later rose to Chancellor and, through his connections with the Kamakura shogunate, to great power. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-second poem, in Book Two of the hundred and fifty-sixth, and in Book Three of the two hundred and sixteenth and sixty-fifth.
The time is the evening of the seventh day of the seventh month; the place is in heaven.
The occasion was the set topic.
Tradition held that magpies laid their wings across the River of Heaven to make a bridge; this poem puts maple leaves in their place.
The first line uses the word for the stars' meeting, recurrent since the three hundred and fifteenth poem.
The second line, like the cool sleeves of the three hundred and twenty-first, takes the evening of the festival through its coolness.
The third line fixes the place.
The fourth line gives a bridge of maple leaves. The festival falls in early autumn and the maples should not yet have turned, so that the bridge is imagined rather than seen: what happens in the sky need not follow the order of the seasons on earth.
The poem closes on a noun. What crosses the bridge is not the stars but the wind. A bridge built for a meeting is used by the wind alone, and the meeting itself is never shown. After the three hundred and nineteenth and twenty-second poems, the wind is again the principal figure of this run.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kintsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Their meeting is not broken off: the river of heaven, and in what autumn was it that they first began to make the crossing
- Once in a long while the waves of the river of heaven draw them close and would that the sky at dawn had no power over them