Nobe goto ni otozure wataru akikaze o ada ni mo nabiku hanasusuki kana

English Translation

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

Meaning

The autumn wind goes calling over one moor after another, and to so faithless a thing the plumed grass bends all the same.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 350

Headnote: when the Regent and Chancellor had a hundred poems written.
The fifth poem on pampas grass. Grass that bends to a wind blowing everywhere is taken for a woman yielding to a faithless man. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence set by Yoshitsune.
The poet was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Shoshi, known as Hachijoin, a daughter of Emperor Toba; her dates are not recorded. She served the same mistress as Hachijoin no Takakura, poet of the fifty-fourth piece in Book One.
The time is autumn; the place is a moor where pampas grass grows.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line means at every moor: the wind makes no distinctions.
The verb in the second line means both to pay a call and to make a sound, as in Shunzei's three hundred and fifth poem; the verb after it adds the sense of reaching everywhere.
The third line names the wind.
The word in the fourth line means fleeting, without substance, and also inconstant. A wind that visits every moor is a fickle man, and the grass that bends to him though it knows is a woman.
The poem closes on a noun. A relation of love is read into the plain fact of grass bending, and the poem belongs with the run that has treated autumn plants as women since the three hundred and thirty-sixth.

Author

Rokujo of Hachijoin

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other