花見にと人やりならぬ野辺に来て
心の限りつくしつるかな
心の限りつくしつるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Hanami ni to hitoyari naranu nobe ni kite kokoro no kagiri tsukushitsuru kana
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- No one sent me: I came out to the moor of my own accord to see the flowers, and spent my whole heart there.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 342
Headnote: composed on seeing the autumn moor, when he was in Tsukushi.
The previous poem closed the run on autumn flowers with a reflection on age; this one too is about the looking. The headnote places it during his time in Tsukushi.
The poet, given by his court title, is Minamoto no Tsunenobu, who rose to Major Counsellor and was accomplished in Chinese verse and music as well as poetry. In Book Two he is the poet of the hundred and twenty-second and hundred and forty-eighth poems and in Book Three of the hundred and ninety-seventh and others. Late in life he went down to Tsukushi as deputy governor-general and died there.
The time is autumn; the place is a moor in Tsukushi.
The occasion was the sight of the autumn moor at his post.
The first line means: meaning to see the flowers.
The second line means not sent by anyone. He went of his own accord, and the depth of his attention follows from that.
The third line fixes the scene.
The fourth line means to the limit of the heart, with everything one has, the phrase used in Murasaki Shikibu's two hundred and fourth poem in Book Three.
The verb at the close means to use up entirely, as in Shunzei's hundredth poem in Book Two, on years of spring spent in that way. It also sounds the name of the province given in the headnote, so that the exhausting of the heart is heard in the name of the distant post. A final exclamatory particle ends the poem.
- Author
- Minamoto no Tsunenobu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- At the mountain man's rough hedge the morning glory is in flower, and except at the break of day there is no way to meet it