女郎花野辺のふるさと思ひ出でて
宿りし虫の声や恋しき
宿りし虫の声や恋しき
- Roma-ji
-
Ominaeshi nobe no furusato omoiidete yadorishi mushi no koe ya koishiki
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Maidenflower, do you remember the moor you came from, and long for the voice of the insect that lodged there?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 337
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The second poem on the maidenflower. The previous poem gave the flower a person to wait for; this one gives it a memory. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Fujiwara no Motozane was a mid-Heian poet, counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry. In Book Three he is the poet of the hundred and eighty-eighth poem.
The time is autumn; the place is a moor.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line names the one addressed.
The second line means the moor it came from. The word for an old home runs through the spring poems of this anthology; here it is the flower's former place, and the flower is imagined as having been picked and carried away.
The third line means remembering. The same verb stands in the imperative in the hundred and forty-third poem of Book Two and the two hundred and seventh of Book Three; here it is the flower's own act.
The fourth line names the insect that lodged on that moor, with a past auxiliary in the attributive form.
An interrogative particle governs the attributive form at the close. A flower longing for an insect's voice is a double stroke of personification: where the previous poem set the flower waiting for a person, this one sets it grieving over a past.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Motozane
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- When the evening comes where the beads of dew are shed the maiden-flowers cannot settle on a place to lay their heads: the wind blows
- Whose the boneset is there is no knowing, and white the dew that spills down and the fragrance rises up in the wind across the moor