Shikishima ya Takamadoyama no kumoma yori hikari sashisou yumihari no tsuki

English Translation

In Yamato, through
a break in the cloud above
Takamado hill
its light comes added to it
the moon drawn like a half bow

Meaning

Over Takamado hill in Yamato, through a break in the cloud, the half moon adds its light.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 383

Headnote: on the theme of a faint moon between clouds.
The eighth poem on the moon. The topic is a dim moon seen through cloud, and the poem shows a half moon adding its light through a gap.
Retired Emperor Horikawa (1079-1107) was the second son of Emperor Shirakawa. He was accomplished in music, and the Horikawa hundred-poem sequences were composed in his reign; they are named in the headnotes to the tenth and nineteenth poems of Book One and the three hundred and twenty-eighth and fifty-fifth of this book.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is Takamado hill in Yamato Province, written of in the three hundred and thirty-first and seventy-third poems.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first line is a word for the land of Yamato, with an exclamatory particle; it appears again in the seven hundred and thirty-sixth poem of Book Seven.
The second line fixes the place.
The third line means through a break in the cloud, the phrase used in the hundred and eightieth and two hundred and thirty-seventh poems of Book Three and the three hundred and seventeenth of this book; the arrangement of looking through a narrow gap is at work again.
The verb in the fourth line means to be added. Light is said to be added to a sky covered over with cloud.
The poem closes on a noun. The moon named is the half moon, shaped like a drawn bow. It is not full, so that its light is weak, and the faintness of the topic is carried by that word.

Author

Retired Emperor Horikawa

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other