Kari no kuru Fushimi no oda ni yume samete nenu yo no io ni tsuki o miru kana

English Translation

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

Meaning

In the little fields at Fushimi, where the geese come down, I wake from a dream and look at the moon from the hut where no one sleeps.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 427

Headnote: on the moon at a house in the fields, for a contest at the Bureau of Poetry.
The second poem on the hut in the fields. The topic is the moon at such a house, and the poet wakes from a dream and watches.
The poet, given as former Archbishop, is Jien; this is his sixth appearance in this book, after the four hundred and fourth poem.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is the fields at Fushimi in Yamashiro Province, written of in the two hundred and ninety-first and ninety-second poems.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line means that the geese are arriving, and sets a sign of autumn.
The place name in the second line sounds the phrase for lying down and looking, which answers to the waking and the watching below, so that the posture of a man lying in a hut and looking at the moon is folded into a name.
The third line gives the waking.
The fourth line means: at the hut of a night without sleep. Such a hut is not a place for sleeping but for sitting out the night on guard over the field.
The poem closes on an exclamatory particle. A place where one stays awake for work becomes a place for watching the moon, as in Chomei's four hundred and first poem, where the moon was found on the sleeves of labouring fishers: the moon set in the place of work.

Author

Jien

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other