いとかくや袖はしをれし野辺に出でて
昔も秋の花は見しかど
昔も秋の花は見しかど
- Roma-ji
-
Ito kaku ya sode wa shioreshi nobe ni idete mukashi mo aki no hana wa mishikado
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Were my sleeves ever so wilted as this? I went out to the moor and looked at autumn's flowers in the old days too.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 341
Headnote: among a hundred poems set by the former Regent, now a lay monk, when he was Minister of the Right.
The poem stands at the close of the run on autumn flowers. Looking at the same flowers, the speaker finds his tears are not what they were. The former Regent of the headnote is Fujiwara no Kanezane, and the poem belongs to the hundred he commissioned while Minister of the Right; the fifth poem of Book One and the two hundred and first of Book Three come from the same sequence.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei; this is his fifth appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninety-first, three hundred and first, fifth and twentieth poems.
The time is autumn; the place is a moor.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line means: to this degree. An interrogative particle governs the past auxiliary in the second.
The verb in the second line means to lose strength, to droop, and here to be limp with weeping. It is used in the sixty-third poem of Book One and the two hundred and twenty-eighth of Book Three.
The third line gives the scene. Mitsune's three hundred and thirty-fifth poem also went out through the autumn moor.
The particle in the fourth line carries the sense of in those days too.
The close joins a past auxiliary in the concessive form to a concessive particle: I saw the same flowers then, and yet. It is the pattern of Komachi's three hundred and twelfth poem, whose dew was not what it had been: unchanging nature against a changed self. The run on autumn flowers is closed with a reflection on age.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- I meant to get up and look at it, and by then it had withered off quicker to go than the dew the morning glory's flower