Kokoro koso akugarenikere aki no yo no yofukaki tsuki o hitori mishi yori

English Translation

It is my own heart
that has wandered off, I find
since the night I looked
alone, at the deep-night moon
of an evening in autumn

Meaning

It is my heart that has gone wandering, ever since the night I looked alone at the late moon of autumn.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 406

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The third poem on the moon and the heart: looking at the moon has sent the heart out of the body. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Minamoto no Michinari was a mid-Heian poet, counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry. In Book Three he is the poet of the hundred and seventy-eighth poem.
The time is deep in a night in autumn; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

An emphatic particle in the first line governs the concessive form in the second. Making the heart the subject is the stance of Tsurayuki's eighty-first poem in Book One and Shunzei's three hundred and tenth in this book.
The verb in the second line means to drift away from the body and wander, used in the eighty-first poem of Book One, where the heart went to the spring hills.
The third and fourth lines name the object; the phrase for a night far gone is the one used in Hideyoshi's three hundred and ninety-eighth poem.
The closing line means: since the night I looked alone. The word for alone shows that solitude is what sent the heart off. Yorimune's three hundred and eighty-fourth poem gazed more than anyone; this one has reached the point where the gazing has taken the heart away.

Author

Minamoto no Michinari

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other