たへてやは思ひありともいかがせん
葎の宿の秋の夕暮
葎の宿の秋の夕暮
- Roma-ji
-
Taete ya wa omoi ari tomo ikaga semu mugura no yado no aki no yūgure
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Could anyone bear it? And what use are thoughts? A house overgrown with weeds, an evening in autumn.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 364
Headnote: from the time when he presented a fifty-poem sequence.
The eighth poem on the autumn evening. Where the three evening poems spoke through a scene, this one states the unbearableness outright. The headnote assigns it to a fifty-poem sequence.
The poet is Asukai no Masatsune, one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-fourth and others, in Book Three of the hundred and eighty-fourth, and in this book of the two hundred and ninety-eighth.
The time is an autumn evening; the place is a house overgrown with weeds.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The particle in the first line is rhetorical: could one bear it? One could not. Yoshitsune's three hundred and fifty-ninth poem uses the same particle, and rhetorical negatives recur through this run.
The particle in the second line marks a concessive supposition: even if there are thoughts.
The third line means: there is nothing to be done.
The word in the fourth line is a general name for climbing weeds, written of as what overruns a neglected house, so that the dwelling is one no one tends.
The poem closes on a noun. The three evening poems showed an absence of colour or of features; this one sets down a particular ruined house, so that a shared ending is reached by another route.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Masatsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Prev Poem
-
Miwataseba hana mo momiji mo nakarikeri ura no tomaya no aki no yūgure
- Next Poem
-
Omou koto sashite sore to wa naki mono o aki no yūbe o kokoro ni zo tou