さむしろや待つ夜の秋の風ふけて
月をかたしく宇治の橋姫
月をかたしく宇治の橋姫
- Roma-ji
-
Samushiro ya matsu yo no aki no kaze fukete tsuki o katashiku Uji no hashihime
- English Translation
-
On the cold thin mat
the autumn wind of a night
spent waiting deepens
and she spreads one sleeve of moon
the maiden of Uji bridge
- Meaning
- On her narrow mat, as the autumn wind of a night of waiting deepens, she lies on a single sleeve of moonlight: the lady of the bridge at Uji.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 420
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, from the fifty poems on the moon.
Within the run on the moon, this poem takes an older piece for its model and writes of sleeping alone. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Teika, a son of Shunzei and one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. This is his second appearance in this book, after the three hundred and sixty-third poem.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is Uji in Yamashiro Province. The lady of the bridge at Uji was a goddess held to guard the bridge, and she was written of as a woman sleeping alone.
The occasion was the set of fifty poems.
The model is the anonymous love poem in the Kokin Wakashu: on her narrow mat, spreading one sleeve of her robe, is she waiting for me tonight too, the lady of the bridge at Uji?
The poem is among Teika's best known.
The word opening the first line names a narrow mat, a poor spread to lie on. The line is the model's own, closed by an exclamatory particle.
The second line means the night of waiting for someone, taking up the model's question about waiting.
The third line has the night deepening with the wind. It is not in the model, and with it the autumn scene is added.
The verb in the fourth line means to spread one sleeve of a robe and lie on it alone, used in Tsunenobu's hundred and ninety-seventh poem in Book Three. In the model it is a robe; here the robe is replaced by the moon. What is spread changes from cloth to light, and the coldness of the solitary bed is the sharper for it.
The poem closes on a noun, the model's own last line. Taking the first line and the last from the older poem and rebuilding the three between them with autumn and moonlight, it was long held up as a model of how allusion should be done.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Teika
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
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- It has swept the clouds away, every one of them and I leave the wind of autumn there in the pines and go on watching the moon
- When even the moon cannot console me, on these nights of the autumn it knows nothing of my heart and blows, the wind in the pines
- There is nothing gained by the length of autumn nights nothing gained at all for while I waited it rose the moon that stays past daybreak
- Where it ends at last the sky is one with the plain of Musashi, and out of a field of grasses the light of the moon comes up