村雨の露もまだ干ぬ真木の葉に
霧立ちのぼる秋の夕暮
霧立ちのぼる秋の夕暮
- Roma-ji
-
Murasame no tsuyu mo mada hinu maki no ha ni kiri tachinoboru aki no yūgure
- English Translation
-
The passing shower's
dew has not yet dried away
on the cedar leaves—
and the mist is rising up
in the dusk of autumn days
- Meaning
- On the leaves of the cedars, still wet with dew from a passing shower, mist rises in the autumn dusk.
- Commentary
-
Book Five Autumn Poems II 491
Headnote: "When I presented a fifty-poem sequence."
This is the first poem of the mist sequence. On the leaves of the cedars, not yet dry from a passing shower, mist rises in the autumn dusk. According to the headnote, it was composed as part of a fifty-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 an autumn dusk after a passing shower, on a mountain thick with cedars.
The direct occasion was a fifty-poem sequence presented to Retired Emperor Go-Toba.
The poem is included in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu.
In the first line, "murasame" is a shower that falls hard for a while and then stops.
In the second line, "hi" is the irrealis of the upper monograde verb "hiru," to dry, and "nu" the attributive of the negative "zu": "not yet dry."
In the third line, "maki" are fine evergreens such as cedar and cypress. Like "the mountain where the cedars stand, in autumn dusk" in Book Four's poem 361 on loneliness, the scene is a cedar mountain at autumn dusk.
The fourth line, "kiri tachinoboru," depicts mist welling up from below, capturing the damp air after rain turning to mist at dusk.
The last line ends on a noun. Layering rain-dew, cedar leaves, and rising mist—a scene widening outward from the near view—the poem conveys the loneliness of autumn dusk through scenery alone, without naming it. The same last line appears in 443, where the deer's cry, rather than mist, evokes the same autumn dusk. The next poem, 492, sets the same cedars in a clouded morning with dripping dew, pairing dusk with morning.
- Author
- Jakuren
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- On an autumn night, robes chilled, though I spread and pile straw mats layered up, there is nothing to compare to the moonlight spread below
- The long autumn nights have become the Long Month now— so it has turned out; no wonder, then, that I find myself waking in the night
- Loneliness—it is autumn in the deep mountains, a clouded morning, dew dripping from the cedars drooping, soaked within the mist
- Ah, the break of day— on the river's rising waves a shallow-draft boat— is someone taking it down? sleeves glimpsed in the autumn mist