花薄またつゆ深しほに出でて
眺めじと思ふ秋の盛りを
眺めじと思ふ秋の盛りを
- Roma-ji
-
Hanasusuki mata tsuyu fukashi ho ni idete nagameji to omou aki no sakari o
- English Translation
-
The plumed grass, and still
the dew lies deep: I had thought
not to let it show
nor to gaze on it at all
upon the height of autumn
- Meaning
- The dew lies deep again on the plumed grass; and I had meant not to let my heart show, not to gaze, at the very height of autumn.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 349
Headnote: from a hundred-poem sequence.
The fourth poem on pampas grass. The phrase for coming into ear is made to serve both the grass and the showing of the poet's own heart. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her third appearance in this book, after the three hundred and eighth and twenty-first poems.
The time is autumn; the place is where pampas grass grows.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line names the grass.
The second line means that the dew lies deep once more, the phrase used in Yorimasa's three hundred and twenty-ninth poem.
The phrase in the third line means both to come into ear and to show on the surface, used of the reed in the two hundred and seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth poems of Book Three and here of the pampas grass.
The auxiliary in the fourth line expresses negative intention. The verb means to gaze while lost in thought, used in the three hundred and twenty-first poem of this book, and the line states a resolve to keep the heart from showing.
The poem closes on a noun with a particle that works almost concessively: at the very height of the season, and still she would not look. The coming into ear of the grass and the surfacing of a feeling are bound in one word. The third line of the text does not agree with the phonetic line given beside it; the reading of the text itself is followed here.
- Author
- Princess Shokushi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- At Ogura hill on the moor below the slope the flowering grass can just be made out, faintly in the evening of autumn
- Only faintly, though I would have the wind blow here on the plumes of grass though they tangle as they go and are soaked through by the dew
- On moor after moor it goes calling as it goes the wind of autumn and to a thing so fickle the plumed grass bends all the same
- Day has come, and so from the moor into the hills the deer goes, and blows after him, behind his track the low wind through the clover