Aki no iro wa magaki ni utoku nariyukedo tamakura naruru neya no tsukikage

English Translation

The colours of fall
grow strange to the garden hedge
and further away
and used to my arm, it stays
the moonlight in my bedroom

Meaning

The colours of autumn grow distant from the hedge; and the moonlight in my chamber has grown used to the arm I pillow my head on.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 432

Headnote: among the autumn poems of a hundred-poem sequence she presented.
As the colours of autumn fail, the moonlight alone comes into the bedchamber unchanged. The headnote assigns the poem to the autumn poems of a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her seventh appearance in this book, after the four hundred and sixteenth and seventeenth poems.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is a bedchamber.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line names the subject, the colour of the plants.
The word in the second line names a fence loosely woven of bamboo or brushwood, used in the two hundred and seventy-fifth poem of Book Three and the three hundred and fortieth of this book; the adjective means not close, having little to do with, used in Michiteru's four hundred and twelfth poem. The fading of the garden is put as a loosening of the tie between colour and hedge.
The concessive particle in the third line turns the poem.
The word in the fourth line means an arm used as a pillow, used in Hitomaro's three hundred and forty-sixth poem; the verb means to grow familiar with, used in Saigyo's hundred and twenty-sixth poem in Book Two. The moonlight has grown used to that arm, which is to say it comes every night.
The poem closes on a noun. The colour outside is going and the light within does not change. Colour against light, outside against inside: near the close of this book, the poem marks the wearing away of autumn.

Author

Princess Shokushi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other