いとどしく思ひ消ぬべし七夕の
別れの袖に置ける白露
別れの袖に置ける白露
- Roma-ji
-
Itodoshiku omoi kenubeshi tanabata no wakare no sode ni okeru shiratsuyu
- English Translation
-
All the more, I fear
the thought of it will end me
the white dew that lies
on the sleeve of the parting
of the Weaver from her lord
- Meaning
- The thought of it will surely make me vanish: the white dew lying on the sleeve of the Weaver's parting.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 326
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, on the theme of Tanabata.
The fourteenth poem on Tanabata, on the parting after the meeting, with the dew on the sleeve taken as tears. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Onakatomi no Yoshinobu, chief priest of the Ise Shrine and one of the thirty-six immortals of poetry. In Book Three he is the poet of the hundred and ninety-sixth poem. Sukechika, poet of the three hundred and seventeenth, was his son.
The time is daybreak on the eighth day of the seventh month; the place is in heaven.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line means all the more, the word used in the two hundred and twenty-eighth and two hundred and fifty-sixth poems of Book Three.
The verb in the second line means to vanish and belongs with dew; joined to the word for thought it means to be extinguished by brooding, so that a person goes out as a drop of dew does. A conjectural auxiliary follows.
The third line names the Weaver.
The fourth line gives the parting after the meeting. The previous poem grieved at the coming of day, and this one takes what follows: the two are set in order of time.
The poem closes on a noun. Dew on a sleeve is a tear, the figure used in the two hundred and ninety-fourth and three hundred and twelfth poems. Dew and a life that vanishes like dew stand in the same poem, and tears and living are laid together.
- Author
- Onakatomi no Yoshinobu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Are they parting now the two of them, and mist rolls up from the river of heaven, and the plovers can be heard, crying somewhere
- In the river's flow the deer has laid a weir, and it does not float free and go down with the current the autumn bush-clover bloom