山賤の垣ほに咲ける朝顔は
しののめならで逢ふよしもなし
しののめならで逢ふよしもなし
- Roma-ji
-
Yamagatsu no kakiho ni sakeru asagao wa shinonome narade au yoshi mo nashi
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- The morning glory blooming at the mountain man's hedge: except at daybreak, there is no way to meet it.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 344
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The second poem on the morning glory. One can meet it only at daybreak, and the meeting is put in the words of love poetry. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Ki no Tsurayuki compiled the Kokin Wakashu and wrote its Japanese preface. This is his third appearance in this book, after the three hundred and thirteenth and twenty-seventh poems.
The time is daybreak in autumn; the place is a hedge in a mountain village.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The word in the first line means a person of low station living in the hills, and gives a poor dwelling.
The word in the second line means a hedge. As in Atsuie's forty-second poem in Book One, on the plum at a hedge, the flower belongs to someone else's house.
The third line names the flower.
The word in the fourth line means daybreak, with a negative connective. Since the flower opens only in the morning, the hour of meeting is fixed.
The verb at the close belongs to love poetry, and the word before it means a means or a way. Meeting a flower is described as a tryst confined to one hour of the day. Where the previous poem measured frailty, this one takes the limit of time for its subject.
- Author
- Ki no Tsurayuki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- The tips are withered of the sedge in the low reeds on the open plain and my thoughts are as tangled as they are, in these days now
- Where the young stag goes into the moor, the pampas in its first plumed ear when shall I make of her arm a pillow for my head there