Mono omowade kakaru tsuyu ya wa sode ni oku nagametekeri na aki no yūgure

English Translation

Would such dew as this
settle on my sleeve, if I
were not brooding here
and so I have been gazing
at the evening of autumn

Meaning

Would such dew settle on my sleeve if I were not brooding? So I have been gazing after all, at the autumn evening.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 359

Headnote: for a hundred-poem contest at his residence.
The third poem on the autumn evening. Where the previous poem found the tears gathered unnoticed, this one reasons back to their cause. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem contest at his own house; the original gives no fresh attribution.
The poet is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, as in the previous poem. The same gathering is named in the headnotes to the twenty-third and thirty-seventh poems of Book One and the two hundred and fifty-first of Book Three.
The time is an autumn evening; no place is given.
The occasion was the contest.

A negative connective in the first line gives the sense of without brooding.
The particle in the second line is rhetorical: would such dew settle? It would not.
The third line completes the construction. It takes up the dew of the three hundred and fifty-eighth poem, so that two pieces handle the same tears.
The verb in the fourth line means to gaze while lost in thought, and an exclamatory particle follows the perfect auxiliary: so I have been gazing after all.
The poem closes on a noun. The previous poem left the cause unknown; this one runs the question back through a rhetorical negative and settles on the gazing itself. The two stand together as a problem and its answer.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other