Aki no ta no karine no toko no inamushiro tsuki yadoredomo shikeru tsuyu kana

English Translation

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

Meaning

The straw mat I doze on in the autumn field: the moon lodges there, and what lies spread on it is dew.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 430

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The poems return to the fields, on a bed made for a short sleep there. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Onakatomi no Sadamasa was a poet of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods, of the family that supplied the chief priests of the Ise Shrine.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is a field in autumn.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first line fixes the place.
The word in the second line does double duty, meaning a short sleep and the roots of cut rice, and it leads into the straw mat below.
The third line names a mat woven of rice straw, used in Sutoku's seventy-first poem in Book One, where willow branches were seen as such matting.
The concessive particle in the fourth line turns the poem: the moon lodges there, and yet.
The poem closes on a noun. A mat is a thing to be spread, so the verb for spreading belongs with it. What is spread is not the mat but dew, and the bed is wet. Moonlight and dew lie together on it, and the poem belongs with the run on the fields that has taken work and sleep for its ground since the four hundred and twenty-sixth.

Author

Onakatomi no Sadamasa

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other