見渡せば花も紅葉もなかりけり
浦の苫屋の秋の夕暮
浦の苫屋の秋の夕暮
- Roma-ji
-
Miwataseba hana mo momiji mo nakarikeri ura no tomaya no aki no yūgure
- English Translation
-
When I look about
there is neither flower nor leaf
of any colour
a thatched hut on the seashore
and an evening of autumn
- Meaning
- Looking out, I find neither blossom nor scarlet leaves: a rush-thatched hut on the shore, an evening in autumn.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 363
Headnote: when the Monk Saigyo urged him and had him write a hundred poems.
The seventh poem on the autumn evening, and the third of the three evening poems. The headnote records that Saigyo urged the writing of the sequence, so that the poet of the previous piece stands behind the making of this one.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Teika, a son of Shunzei and one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. He appears in Book One from the thirty-eighth poem, in Book Two from the hundred and thirty-fourth, and in Book Three from the two hundred and thirty-second; this is his first appearance in this book.
The time is an autumn evening; the place is a shore. The hut named is one roofed with rush matting.
The occasion was the hundred-poem sequence written at Saigyo's urging.
The first line throws the view wide open, the phrase used in Go-Toba's thirty-sixth poem in Book Two and in the two hundred and ninety-first and three hundred and seventeenth poems of this book.
The second line names blossom and scarlet leaves, the two features that stand for the beauty of the seasons.
The third line repeats the phrase of the previous poem and of the three hundred and sixty-first, so that two of the three end alike, sharing a method of showing a scene by denial.
The fourth line gives a poor hut on the shore, a building without colour or ornament, set in the place of the blossom and leaves just denied.
The poem closes on a noun. Two expected things are named and refused, and an ordinary hut is put in their place, the procedure of the three hundred and sixty-first poem, which denied colour and set an evergreen mountain there. All three find the autumn evening precisely where the striking features have been sent away.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Teika
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The loneliness is not a thing of any one colour after all a mountain of black pine trees and an evening of autumn
- Even to a heart that has renounced, the sadness makes itself known here a snipe rising from a marsh and an evening of autumn
- Could I bear it, then and though I have thoughts, what would I do about them at this house of tangled weeds in the evening of autumn
- There is nothing I can point to and say, that is the thing that troubles and yet I put to my heart the question of autumn's dusk