秋風にたなびく雲の絶え間より
漏れ出づる月の影のさやけさ
漏れ出づる月の影のさやけさ
- Roma-ji
-
Akikaze ni tanabiku kumo no taema yori moreizuru tsuki no kage no sayakesa
- English Translation
-
In the autumn wind
through a break in the long cloud
that trails across, it
comes leaking out: how clear it
is, the light of the moon there
- Meaning
- Through a break in the cloud that trails on the autumn wind, the moonlight comes leaking out: how clear it is.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 413
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence to Retired Emperor Sutoku.
The third poem pairing cloud with the moon, on the clearness of moonlight through a gap. The headnote refers to the Kyuan sequences of 1150, from which the three hundred and first and fortieth poems also come.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Akisuke. He compiled the Shika Wakashu and built the poetics of the Rokujo house. In Book Two he is the poet of the hundred and twenty-fourth poem. Kiyosuke, poet of the three hundred and fortieth, was his son, and Kensho, poet of the two hundred and ninety-sixth, his adopted son.
The time is a night in autumn; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The poem is among Akisuke's best known.
The first line gives the cause. The two poems before it had a storm sweeping the cloud away; the wind here only makes it trail and opens a gap. Three poems stand in order of the wind's strength.
The verb in the second line means to trail out at length.
The third line means through a break in the cloud, the arrangement of the three hundred and seventeenth and eighty-third poems of this book: looking through a narrow gap.
The verb in the fourth line means for light to leak through, used in the daughter of Shunzei's three hundred and seventy-fifth poem and Jakuren's three hundred and ninety-sixth, where it did not leak; here it does.
The poem closes on a noun. The adjective means clear and bright, with a suffix that turns it into a noun. No feeling is stated; the poem ends by naming a quality of light and nothing else.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Akisuke
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The light of the moon shines clear from end to end now across heaven's plain for the storm at dead of night has swept the clouds away, all
- On Tatsuta hill when at midnight the storm blows through the pines, the moon above the ridge is a thing the clouds can come nowhere near
- Across the ridgeline a cloud goes over, and so in the early night the moon has come out, and still I find I wait for it yet
- Gazing at it still the very thought wets my sleeve and how many nights more of it am I to see the moon of an autumn night