秋田守る仮庵作り我が居れば
衣手寒し露ぞ置きける
衣手寒し露ぞ置きける
- Roma-ji
-
Akita moru kariio tsukuri waga oreba koromode samushi tsuyu zo okikeru
- English Translation
-
Guarding autumn fields,
I have built a makeshift hut
and here I stay on—
how cold my sleeves have become,
for the dew has settled there
- Meaning
- Guarding the autumn fields, I built a temporary hut and stay in it; my sleeves are cold, for the dew has settled on them.
- Commentary
-
Book Five Autumn Poems II 454
Headnote: "Topic unknown."
This is the second poem of the sequence on autumn fields and the autumn chill. Staying in a temporary hut to guard the autumn fields, the speaker feels the sleeves grow cold and realizes that dew has settled on them. The headnote gives no topic, and the circumstances of composition are not recorded.
The author is listed as "Anonymous," and the name is not known.
The scene is an autumn night into dawn, in a temporary hut built to guard the autumn fields.
The direct occasion is not recorded.
It is a variant of an anonymous poem in Book Ten of the Man'yōshū, "Akita karu kariio o tsukuri waga oreba koromode samuku tsuyu zo okinikeru," with small differences in the first, fourth, and last lines. The poem attributed to Emperor Tenji in the second book of autumn poems of the Gosenshū, "Aki no ta no kariho no io no toma o arami waga koromode wa tsuyu ni nuretsutsu," is regarded as a variant or reworking of that Man'yōshū poem.
The first line, "akita moru," means guarding the ripened autumn fields from birds and beasts.
In the second line, "kariio" is a rough hut built temporarily for keeping watch over the fields.
The third line, the realis form with "ba," means "as I stay there."
The fourth line ends in the conclusive form, and the poem breaks here: first the coldness of the sleeves is felt. Taking up "the sleeves of the hut-keeper" in 453, it describes the chill felt in the guard's own sleeves, and poems on the cold follow: "chills my hands" in 455, "the wild geese cry cold" in 456, "the autumn wind will blow cold" in 457, and "cold night after night" in 458.
In the last line, the emphatic "zo" is resolved by "keru," the attributive of the exclamatory "keri," expressing the surprise of realizing only then that the cold came from the dew. The dew on the sleeves also anticipates the dew sequence beginning at 461.
- Author
- Unknown Poet
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- As a keepsake of the autumn that is passing does the stag hold dear even his own calling voice, loath to let it fade away?
- Why, of all the sleeves, are those of the hut-keeper so drenched and limp now? Is it only on rice leaves that the autumn wind will blow?
- When autumn arrives the dawn wind at break of day chills my hands so much I leave the field's clappers to the wind, and just listen there
- Planted in the rains when the cuckoo's song was heard, the fields now are reaped; the wild geese cry cold above, and the autumn has grown late