あくがれて寝ぬ夜の塵の積もるまで
月にはらはぬ床のさむしろ
月にはらはぬ床のさむしろ
- Roma-ji
-
Akugarete nenu yo no chiri no tsumoru made tsuki ni harawanu toko no samushiro
- English Translation
-
My heart has wandered
and through the nights I do not
sleep, the dust gathers
for I have not swept it clear
this thin mat of my bedding
- Meaning
- My heart has gone wandering, and through the sleepless nights the dust has gathered on the thin mat of my bed, which not even the moon sweeps clean.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 429
Headnote: topic unknown.
Following the run on the hut in the fields, the poem turns to a bed on a sleepless night. The original gives no fresh attribution, which indicates the same poet as before.
The poet is the daughter of Fujiwara no Shunzei, as in the previous poem.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is a bedchamber.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The verb in the first line means to drift away from the body and wander, used in Tsurayuki's eighty-first poem in Book One and Michinari's four hundred and sixth in this one.
The second line means the dust of nights without sleep: a bed unused gathers dust.
The third line marks degree, showing how long the sleeplessness has lasted.
The fourth line means that not even the moon sweeps it. It may be read as saying that the moonlight does not reach the bed at all, or that moonlight cannot sweep dust away.
The poem closes on a noun. The word for the mat means a narrow, poor spread, used in Teika's four hundred and twentieth poem; there it belonged to a woman waiting alone, and here to a bed left unslept in, so that one word serves two scenes.
- Author
- The Daughter of Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- I leave it to the wind that goes through the rice leaves this hut where I live and it is the moon, in truth that keeps the watch until dawn
- In the autumn field on the straw mat of a bed where I doze a while the moon lodges, and even so the dew has settled thickly
- Where he sets his hut in the autumn field, the thatch of the poor man's roof is coarse, and with the moon he must be keeping watch till dawn