秋の野を分けゆく露に移りつつ
わが衣手は花の香ぞする
わが衣手は花の香ぞする
- Roma-ji
-
Aki no no o wakeyuku tsuyu ni utsuritsutsu waga koromode wa hana no ka zo suru
- English Translation
-
Making my way through
the autumn moor, in the dew
it has passed across
and now the sleeves of my robe
carry the flowers' fragrance
- Meaning
- Pushing through the autumn moor, the scent has passed into the dew and from the dew to me: my sleeves smell of the flowers.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 335
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
This poem closes the run on bush clover, with the flowers' scent carried to a robe by way of the dew. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Oshikochi no Mitsune was an early Heian poet and one of the compilers of the Kokin Wakashu. In Book One he is the poet of the twenty-second and sixty-eighth poems and in Book Two of the hundred and sixth.
The time is autumn; the place is an autumn moor.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first two lines mean pushing the grass aside as one goes, as in Sueyoshi's ninety-seventh poem in Book Two, where the labour of getting through is likewise given.
The verb in the third line means for colour or scent to pass into something else; a continuative particle makes the passing go on with every step. The three hundred and twenty-ninth poem left colour to transfer of itself; here it is scent, and the two answer each other on that verb.
The word in the fourth line means sleeves.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. Tsurayuki's hundred and eleventh poem in Book Three said that a robe had taken the scent of blossom deeply; there the flowers were spring's and here autumn's. What this poem adds is the dew as the medium that carries the scent.
- Author
- Oshikochi no Mitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Where the young stag goes out at morning, on the moor the autumn clover and lying on it like beads the white dew of the morning
- For whom is she then the maiden-flower that stands on Matsuchi hill there must be someone with whom she has made a pact for fall
- Maiden-flower, do you remember the old home out on the wide moor and do you long for the voice of the insect that lodged there