Mi ni soeru kage to koso mire aki no tsuki sode ni utsuranu ori shi nakereba

English Translation

It is a light that
goes with me, that is how I
see the autumn moon
for there is no hour at all
when it is not on my sleeve

Meaning

I take it for a light that goes with me: the autumn moon, since there is never an hour when it is not reflected on my sleeve.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 410

Headnote: a reply.
This answers the previous poem. To the question of what is added to the moon, it replies that what is added is the speaker herself.
Sagami was a lady-in-waiting and poet of the mid-Heian period; this is her third appearance in this book, after the three hundred and ninth and seventy-second poems.
The season is that of the previous poem.
The occasion was the arrival of Norinaga's poem.

The verb in the first line takes up the verb for adding that closed the previous poem. Returning the sender's own word is the practice of exchange, as in the forty-ninth poem of Book One and the hundred and thirty-sixth and thirty-eighth of Book Two.
An emphatic particle in the second line governs the concessive form: she takes the moonlight for something that follows her about like a shadow. The word used means both light and a shadow that goes with a body.
The third line names the object.
The fourth line means: not reflected on the sleeve. Dew on a sleeve is a tear, so that the moon shows there because of the tears.
The emphatic particle at the close strengthens the reason: because there is never such an hour. Where the previous poem looked for the cause in the moon, this one finds it in the speaker, setting out in an exchange the argument of Chomei's three hundred and sixty-sixth poem, that the dew comes from ourselves.

Author

Sagami

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other