月見れば思ひぞあへぬ山高み
いづれの年の雪にかあるらん
いづれの年の雪にかあるらん
- Roma-ji
-
Tsuki mireba omoi zo aenu yama takami izure no toshi no yuki ni ka aruramu
- English Translation
-
When I see the moon
I cannot have done thinking
the hills are so high
and of what year is the snow
that is lying up there now
- Meaning
- When I look at the moon I cannot have done with thinking: the hills are so high, and of what year is that snow?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 388
Headnote: when many poems on the moon were written at the residence of the Hossho-ji Regent and Chancellor.
The thirteenth poem on the moon, asking whether the whiteness on a high mountain is moonlight or snow of some earlier year. The headnote places it at the house of Fujiwara no Tadamichi, poet of the three hundred and eighty-sixth piece.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shigeie, a son of Fujiwara no Akisuke and a member of the Rokujo house. In Book Three he is the poet of the hundred and eighty-first poem. Fujiwara no Ariie, poet of the three hundred and seventy-seventh, was his son.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is within sight of a high mountain.
The occasion was the writing of the poems.
The first line gives a settled condition.
The verb in the second line adds the sense of doing a thing through to the end, and it is negated: the thinking cannot be finished. It is the form of Hachijoin no Takakura's two hundred and eighth poem in Book Three.
The third line, an adjective stem with a suffix, states a cause: because the hills are high. It is the construction of the hundred and thirtieth and thirty-first poems of Book Two.
The fourth line asks of what year. Snow on high mountains was held to last from year to year, and the question is which year's snow the whiteness belongs to.
An interrogative particle and an auxiliary of present conjecture close the poem. The whiteness of moonlight and the whiteness of snow are not told apart, and the question is left standing. Mistaking one white thing for another recurs through this anthology; here it extends into a question about time.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shigeie
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- When the wind comes up the beads are shed, and briefly in the dew beneath the bush clover it lodges the moon out on the wide moor
- Who is it tonight with the wind through the bamboo go through him, watching the moon above the summits of Yoshino, I wonder
- On the grebe's own lake when the light of the moon shifts and moves on the waves even in the foam's flowers the autumn can be seen now
- As the night grows late there will be no smoke: do not look at the bay there with reproach until the end you moon of an autumn night