秋の月しのに宿かる影たけて
小笹が原に露ふけにけり
小笹が原に露ふけにけり
- Roma-ji
-
Aki no tsuki shino ni yadokaru kage takete ozasa ga hara ni tsuyu fukenikeri
- English Translation
-
The moon of autumn
takes lodging in the bamboo
and its light rides high
and on the field of dwarf grass
the dew has deepened with night
- Meaning
- The autumn moon that lodged among the bamboo has climbed high, and on the field of dwarf grass the dew has deepened with the night.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 425
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
Moon, dew and grass again, following the poem before. The rising of the moon marks the deepening of the night, and the deepening of the dew shows it. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Minamoto no Ienaga served as secretary of the Bureau of Poetry. He had a hand in the practical work of compiling the Shin Kokin Wakashu and left a diary of his own. A poem by him appears in Book Seven, at the seven hundred and forty-first.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is a field of dwarf bamboo grass.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line names the object.
The word in the second line names slender bamboo, used in Yorimasa's three hundred and eighty-seventh poem, and the phrase for taking lodging is the one used in the previous poem, so that the two share it.
The verb in the third line means to rise high. The moon has climbed, and the passing of the hours is given.
The fourth line names dwarf bamboo grass, with a rhythmic prefix, used in the two hundred and nineteenth and eightieth poems of Book Three.
The verb at the close means for the night to grow late, and used of dew it also carries the sense of the dew growing heavy. The deepening of the night and of the dew are held in one word, and the passage of time is shown as a change on the grass.
- Author
- Minamoto no Ienaga
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Are they waiting still for the moon, I wonder, those villagers who live under the far edge of cloud that is clearing after rain
- On an autumn night the moon that lodges is still a thing of the dew and over my sleeve it blows the high wind through the reed-tops
- The wind goes across and the moon that leaks in through the hut in the field can it be ice that has formed on the waves of ripened grain
- Where the wild geese come at Fushimi, in the fields I wake from my dream and at the hut where no one sleeps, I look up at the moon