荻の葉に吹けば嵐の秋なるを
待ちける夜半のさを鹿の声
待ちける夜半のさを鹿の声
- Roma-ji
-
Ogi no ha ni fukeba arashi no aki naru o machikeru yowa no saoshika no koe
- English Translation
-
Where it blows the reeds
it is autumn, and a storm
and what has waited
for this: at the dead of night
the voice of the calling stag
- Meaning
- It is a season in which the wind on the reeds becomes a storm; and this is what had been waiting for it, the stag's voice at midnight.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 356
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The poem stands at the turn from the reeds to the deer. In the season when the wind rattles the reeds, the stag cries as if it had waited for it. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, a son of the Regent Fujiwara no Kanezane and author of the Japanese preface to the Shin Kokin Wakashu. This is his second appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninety-third poem.
The time is midnight in autumn; the place is where reeds grow.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first two lines mean that when the wind blows on the reeds it becomes a storm. The word names a violent wind, and the loudness of the reeds makes it felt as one.
The particle closing the third line works almost concessively: in so rough a season, and yet.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the fourth line marks the recognition that something had been waiting: the stag had been waiting for this season.
The poem closes on a noun, with a decorative prefix on the word for stag. The deer was said to cry in autumn for its mate, and poems on its voice follow through this book. A season people grieve over is one the deer has been waiting for, and against the run of reed poems up to the three hundred and fifty-fifth, which stated grief, this one takes autumn as something awaited.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- In autumn I do nothing but brood, and even at the wind that blows over the reeds where the dew is clinging, it is the same
- The wind of autumn blows a little cold, and with its blowing there comes the sound of the reeds' top leaves and that sound is a sad one
- All the things I thought I had thought, in all their kinds and deeper than these is the colour that deepens in the evening of autumn
- Looking at autumn in an empty sky that goes dark toward evening before I know it, they stand the drops of dew on my sleeve