薄霧の籬の花の朝しめり
秋は夕べと誰か言ひけん
秋は夕べと誰か言ひけん
- Roma-ji
-
Usugiri no magaki no hana no asashimeri aki wa yūbe to tare ka iikemu
- English Translation
-
In a thin mist, on
the flowers of the hedgerow
the damp of morning
and who was it who declared
that autumn is for evening
- Meaning
- The flowers at the hedge are damp with morning under a thin mist; and who was it that said autumn was a thing of evenings?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 340
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence to Retired Emperor Sutoku.
The poem gives the beauty of an autumn morning and sets aside the received view that autumn belongs to the evening. The headnote refers to the Kyuan sequences of 1150, from which the three hundred and first poem also comes.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Kiyosuke, a son of Fujiwara no Akisuke, who inherited the poetics of the Rokujo house and wrote treatises on poetry. In Book One he is the poet of the thirty-fourth poem and in Book Three of the two hundred and sixty-fourth.
The time is an autumn morning; the place is a garden with a hedge.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line names a thin mist. Mist belongs to autumn and appears in the three hundred and second and three hundred and twenty-seventh poems.
The word in the second line names a fence loosely woven of bamboo or brushwood, used in Takakura's two hundred and seventy-fifth poem in Book Three.
The third line names the damp of morning: flowers wet with mist. Everything to this point is scene, and the lower lines turn to argument.
In the fourth and fifth lines an interrogative particle stands with an auxiliary of past conjecture. That autumn is best at evening had been the common view since the Pillow Book, and Go-Toba's thirty-sixth poem in Book Two set it aside in favour of a spring evening. This poem sets it aside from the side of an autumn morning, so that two answers to one convention stand within this anthology.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kiyosuke
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Were my sleeves like this so wilted then, when I went out onto the moor for I saw the autumn flowers in those old days too, and yet
- To see the flowers no one sent me: I came out onto the wide moor and spent there to the last drop the whole of what my heart had