物思ふ袖より露や習ひけん
秋風吹けば堪へぬものとは
秋風吹けば堪へぬものとは
- Roma-ji
-
Mono omou sode yori tsuyu ya naraiken akikaze fukeba taenu mono to wa
- English Translation
-
Did the dew perhaps
learn it from the sleeves of one
lost in brooding thought—
that when the autumn wind blows
it cannot hold itself back?
- Meaning
- Did the dew learn it from the sleeves of one lost in sorrowful thought—that when the autumn wind blows, it cannot hold itself back?
- Commentary
-
Book Five Autumn Poems II 469
Headnote: "When I presented a hundred-poem sequence."
This is the ninth poem of the dew sequence. The poet asks whether the dew learned from the sleeves of one lost in sorrow that it cannot hold back when the autumn wind blows. According to the headnote, it was composed as part of a hundred-poem sequence.
The author's lay name was Fujiwara no Sadanaga; a nephew of Fujiwara no Shunzei, he became Shunzei's adopted son. He was appointed a compiler of the Shinkokinshū but died before it was presented.
The scene is autumn with the wind blowing, in dewy fields and on the sleeves of one lost in thought.
The direct occasion was Retired Emperor Go-Toba's First Hundred-Poem Sequences of 1200.
The first line, "mono omou," means to be sunk in brooding, as over love.
In the second line, "yori" means "from," showing that the sleeves of the brooding person are what the dew learned from; "ya" is interrogative. It builds on 461, where dew was likened to tears on the sleeves of the sorrowful.
In the third line, "ken" is the attributive of the past conjectural "kemu," bound to "ya." The poem breaks here.
The fourth line, the realis form with "ba," means "when the autumn wind blows."
The last line, inverted, gives at the close what the dew learned. The poet asks whether the dew, spilling helplessly in the autumn wind, learned this from sleeves that cannot hold back tears in sorrow. The heart of the poem is its reversal of the convention likening tears on sleeves to dew: here the dew imitates the sleeves. The next poem, 470, picks up the word "narai" and answers that dew on the sleeves of one in sorrow is not limited to autumn, linking the two poems through "narau" and "narai."
- Author
- Jakuren
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Over the garden on the mugwort growing thick making that excuse, just as it pleases its heart the dewdrops have settled here
- Bending down the blades of grasses on autumn moors the dew lies heavy— drenched by it, will someone still go on seeking through the fields?
- On sleeves, the dew falls when one is lost in brooding, surely it settles, though it need not be the way of autumn alone to fall
- From the open fields seeking out the kin of dew it has come this way— on the sleeves of my own robe the autumn wind is blowing