寂しさはその色としもなかりけり
真木立つ山の秋の夕暮
真木立つ山の秋の夕暮
- Roma-ji
-
Sabishisa wa sono iro to shi mo nakarikeri maki tatsu yama no aki no yūgure
- English Translation
-
The loneliness is
not a thing of any one
colour after all
a mountain of black pine trees
and an evening of autumn
- Meaning
- Loneliness is not, after all, a matter of this colour or that: a mountain of evergreens, an evening in autumn.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 361
Headnote: topic unknown.
The fifth poem on the autumn evening. This poem and the two that follow all end on those words and have long been known together as the three evening poems. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The Monk Jakuren, whose lay name was Fujiwara no Sadanaga, was a nephew and adopted son of Fujiwara no Shunzei. He took orders and was appointed one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu, but died before it was finished. In Book One he is the poet of the fifty-eighth and eighty-seventh poems, in Book Two of the hundred and fifty-fourth and others, and in Book Three of the two hundred and fifty-second.
The time is an autumn evening; the place is a mountain of evergreens, cedar and cypress and the like.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
All three poems avoid the striking features of the season, maple and blossom, and take the autumn evening through a scene without colour.
The first line names the subject: not a scene but a feeling.
The second line means: as this particular colour, with an emphatic particle. A colour proper to loneliness is looked for and not found.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the recognition: it was not so after all. The received notion that loneliness lies in colours such as the maple's is set aside.
The fourth line gives a mountain of evergreens, which does not change with the season. A scene without colour bears out the claim of the second line.
The poem closes on a noun. Having denied colour, it sets down nothing but a colourless mountain and an evening. It shows a scene in which nothing happens and nothing is coloured, and the two poems that follow take the same stance.
- Author
- The Monk Jakuren
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- On the mountain road from what hour did the colours turn to autumn's own in the cloud I did not see in the evening sky up there
- Even to a heart that has renounced, the sadness makes itself known here a snipe rising from a marsh and an evening of autumn
- When I look about there is neither flower nor leaf of any colour a thatched hut on the seashore and an evening of autumn