Akihagi no sakichiru nobe no yūtsuyu ni nuretsutsu kimase yo wa fukenu tomo

English Translation

Where the clover blooms
and falls, out across the moor
in the evening dew
come to me, though you are wet
and though the night has grown late

Meaning

Come to me through the evening dew of the moor where the autumn clover blooms and falls, wet as you will be, and late as the night may be.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 333

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The sixth poem on bush clover, asking someone to come across the clover moor. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet is Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, a poet of the Asuka period and the greatest figure of the Man'yoshu. In Book Three he is the poet of the hundred and ninetieth poem.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is a moor where clover grows.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first two lines give a moor where the clover blooms and falls; setting the two together shows a season already past its height.
The third line names the cause of the wetting: walk through a moor thick with dew and one's clothes are soaked. The three hundred and twenty-ninth and thirtieth poems had the speaker's own robe wet; here it is another's.
The verb in the fourth line is an honorific imperative: please come. A continuative particle keeps the wetting going.
The particle at the close marks a concessive supposition. Wet and late alike are conceded, a double allowance that measures how much the coming is wanted. The three poems before this took the staining and wetting of a robe as the speaker's own affair; this one asks it of another, and the tone comes close to that of a love poem.

Author

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other