Okite mimu to omoishi hodo ni karenikeri tsuyu yori kenaru asagao no hana

English Translation

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

Meaning

While I was still meaning to get up and look, it had withered: the morning glory, quicker to go than the dew.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 343

Headnote: topic unknown.
Two poems on the morning glory follow. This one has the flower gone before the poet has got up to see it. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Sone no Yoshitada was a mid-Heian poet, known by a shortened name from his post as a secretary in Tango. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-seventh poem, in Book Three of the hundred and eighty-sixth and eighty-seventh, and in this book of the three hundred and eleventh.
The time is a morning in autumn; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The morning glory opens in the morning and closes before midday, and was written of as an example of what does not last.

The word opening the first line does double duty: rising from bed, and dew settling. It leads into the dew below.
The second line means while I was still thinking of it, so that intention and event fall apart. It is the pattern of Takatoki's eightieth poem in Book Two, where the days went by while the poet was still meaning to go.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line gives the tone of noticing only after the fact.
The word in the fourth line means out of the ordinary, unlike other things, and it also carries the sound of the verb for vanishing, so that it means quicker to go than the dew. Dew is the standard measure of what does not last, and the flower is set above it.
The poem closes on a noun. In a contest of frailty, the morning glory is placed higher than the dew.

Author

Sone no Yoshitada

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other