Sore nagara mukashi ni mo aranu akikaze ni itodo nagame o shizu no odamaki

English Translation

The same, and yet not
what it was in the old days
this autumn wind, and
I gaze the more, and the more
as a spindle turns its thread

Meaning

The same autumn wind, and not what it was of old; and at it I gaze on and on, as the spindle winds and unwinds.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 368

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, an autumn poem.
Following the run on the autumn evening, the poem finds the same wind no longer what it was. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her fourth appearance in this book, after the three hundred and eighth, twenty-first and forty-ninth poems.
The time is autumn; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The spindle named at the close is a ring wound with hemp or ramie thread; because thread is drawn from it and wound back, it stands for repetition.

The first line means: being that same thing. The identity of the wind is granted.
The second line means not as it was long ago. It is the shape of Komachi's three hundred and twelfth poem, where the wind was the same and the tears were not; here the wind itself is said to have changed.
The third line names the object.
The word in the fourth line means all the more, and its sound carries the word for thread, which leads into the spindle below. The verb means to gaze while lost in thought.
The poem closes on a noun. Thread is drawn from the spindle and wound back, so that it stands for doing one thing over and over, and in that one word the endlessness of the gazing is given.

Author

Princess Shokushi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other