Kawamizu ni shika no shigarami kaketekeri ukite nagarenu akihagi no hana

English Translation

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

Meaning

The deer has set a weir across the water: the autumn clover floats there and will not go downstream.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 328

Headnote: composed on bush clover, among a hundred poems presented in the reign of Emperor Horikawa.
A run on bush clover begins here. Blossom floating on a river and not carried away is taken for a weir the deer has built. The headnote assigns it to the Horikawa sequences, from which the tenth and nineteenth poems of Book One and the hundred and twenty-third and hundred and sixtieth of Book Two also come.
The poet, given by his court title, is Oe no Masafusa, born into a family of scholars and risen to Provisional Middle Counsellor. In Book Three he is the poet of the two hundredth and two hundred and twenty-ninth poems.
The time is autumn; the place is a riverbank where clover grows.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred poems.
Bush clover is commonly paired with the deer, and was even spoken of as the deer's wife.

The first line gives the place.
The word in the second line names a barrier of stakes and brushwood set to hold back water. The clover lying on the surface is taken for such a thing, made by the deer.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the recognition.
The fourth line means floating and not carried off, which supplies the reasoning: it is held by the weir.
The poem closes on a noun. In fact the flowers have merely gathered on the water, and the device is to supply a maker for them. The received tie between clover and deer is used in the shape of a contrivance in a river, as in Sutoku's seventy-first poem in Book One, where waves wove the willows: human work assigned to nature.

Author

Oe no Masafusa

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other