秋来れば常磐の山の松風も
うつるばかりに身にぞしみける
うつるばかりに身にぞしみける
- Roma-ji
-
Aki kureba tokiwa no yama no matsukaze mo utsuru bakari ni mi ni zo shimikeru
- English Translation
-
When the autumn comes
even the wind in the pines
of the evergreen
mountain goes into me so
that the colour seems to change
- Meaning
- When autumn comes, even the wind in the pines of the unchanging mountain goes through me until it seems their colour must change.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 370
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The autumn wind is measured against the pine, whose colour does not change. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Izumi Shikibu was a lady-in-waiting and poet of the mid-Heian period; her dates are not recorded. She served Empress Shoshi and is known for the ardour of her love poems.
The time is autumn; the place is a mountain of evergreens, named for its unchangingness.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line gives a settled condition.
The word in the second line means everlasting, unchanging, used in Yoshitsune's sixty-sixth poem in Book One. A mountain whose colour does not alter is brought forward.
The particle in the third line carries the sense of even the wind in the pines. Pine is evergreen and does not turn, so that it is a tree by which autumn cannot ordinarily be known; the two hundred and ninetieth and three hundred and sixth poems also turn on that fact.
The verb in the fourth line means for colour to change, and the word after it marks degree: so much that even the unchanging pine might change.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. The phrase means to be felt to the bone, used in the two hundred and eighty-first poem of Book Three and the three hundred and twenty-second of this book. By making the change reach what does not change, the poem measures the force of the wind.
- Author
- Izumi Shikibu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- The evening in which the cicadas cry is hard to bear, though the thoughts I have are the ones that come always, and are never done
- The autumn wind comes blowing from elsewhere across Otowa mountain and what grass or tree of them could keep its peace under it
- At the break of day the dew, and the tears as well do not stay, and yet the voice of the wind that grieves is a thing that has remained