初雁の羽風涼しくなるなへに
誰か旅寝の衣返さぬ
誰か旅寝の衣返さぬ
- Roma-ji
-
Hatsukari no hakaze suzushiku naru nae ni tare ka tabine no koromo kaesanu
- English Translation
-
As the first geese's wings
stir a wind that grows so cool,
who, in lodgings far,
sleeping on the traveler's road,
would not turn his robe around?
- Meaning
- As the wind from the wings of the first wild geese grows cool, what traveler sleeping away from home would not turn his robe inside out?
- Commentary
-
Book Five Autumn Poems II 499
Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Topic unknown."
This is the third poem of the wild goose sequence. As the wind from the first geese's wings grows cool, every traveler sleeping away from home must turn his robe inside out. The headnote, continued from the preceding poem, gives no topic, and the circumstances of composition are not recorded.
The author was an early Heian poet and one of the compilers of the Kokinshū.
The scene is an autumn night as the first geese arrive, at a lodging on a journey.
The direct occasion is not recorded.
There was a folk belief that sleeping with one's night robe turned inside out would bring a dream of the beloved, as in Ono no Komachi's poem in the second book of love poems of the Kokinshū, "When longing presses hard, I wear my night robe turned inside out."
In the first line, "hatsukari" are the first geese to arrive in autumn; first geese appear again in 501 and 505.
In the second line, "hakaze" is the wind stirred by wings, the same word as in "the beating wings of the passing geese" in 458.
In the third line, "nae ni" means "as," the same construction as in 497.
In the fourth line, "ka" is a rhetorical particle bound to "nu" in the last line; "tabine" is sleeping away from home.
In the last line, "nu" is the attributive of the negative "zu": "who would not turn his robe?"—that is, everyone would. Drawing on the belief that a turned night robe brings dreams of the beloved, the poem strengthens, through a rhetorical question, the longing for home that autumn's chill stirs in travelers. In making geese evoke both traveler and home, it echoes 481, where geese tell the traveler of fulling at home.
- Author
- Oshikochi no Mitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- By the hedge the reeds rustle in their leaves, and as the autumn wind blows, sweeping through them, even now the wild geese are calling out
- On the autumn wind crossing over the mountains, the wild geese in flight draw ever farther away, vanishing into the clouds
- The wild geese fly by racing with the wind as though vying as they pass, yet from the one I await not a single word they bring
- At the break of dawn when the trailing banks of cloud part upon the wind, crossing over the mountains the voice of the first wild geese