Yukusue wa sora mo hitotsu no Musashino ni kusa no hara yori izuru tsukikage

English Translation

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

Meaning

Out where it ends, sky and plain are one on Musashi moor, and the moonlight rises out of a field of grass.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 422

Headnote: on the moon over a path across the moor, from the time when he presented a fifty-poem sequence.
The topic is the moon over a track across open country, and the poem shows the moon rising out of the grass where there are no hills.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune; he appears in this book at the four hundred and eighteenth and nineteenth poems.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is Musashi moor in Musashi Province, written of in Michiteru's three hundred and seventy-eighth poem.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The poem is among Yoshitsune's best known.

The first line means: out at the far end. The three hundred and seventy-eighth poem asked what wind blew at that end; this one sees all the way to it.
The second line means that sky and ground become one: with nothing to break the view, the line between them disappears at the horizon.
The third line fixes the place.
The fourth line means: out of a field of grass. The moon usually rises from the edge of the hills, and on a plain with no hills it rises from the grass. A convention of the art is displaced by the shape of the ground.
The poem closes on a noun. Nothing is piled up to convey the breadth; it is given by a single fact, that the place of moonrise has changed, and a great space is held in plain words.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other