Nezame suru sode sae samuku aki no yo no arashi fuku nari matsumushi no koe

English Translation

Waking in the night,
even my sleeves feel the cold—
on this autumn night
the storm wind is blowing hard;
the voice of the pine cricket

Meaning

Awake in the night, even my sleeves feel cold; the storm wind of the autumn night seems to be blowing, and with it, the voice of the pine cricket.

Commentary

Book Five Autumn Poems II 511

Headnote: "Topic unknown."
This is the second and final poem of the sequence on insects at autumn's end. Awake in the night, with even the sleeves cold as the autumn storm blows, the speaker hears the pine cricket. The headnote gives no topic, and the circumstances of composition are not recorded.
The author was a mid-Heian poet and one of the Thirty-six Poetic Immortals of the Middle Ages.
The scene is a stormy autumn night, in a bedchamber where the speaker lies awake.
The direct occasion is not recorded.

The first line, "nezame suru," means waking in the night, continuing the waking poems such as 447 and 449.
In the second line, "sae" is additive: "even the sleeves, not only the body, are cold."
The third line modifies "arashi" in the fourth line.
In the fourth line, "nari" is the auxiliary of inference from sound, showing that the storm is heard. The poem breaks here.
The last line ends on a noun, placing at the close the pine cricket's voice heard through the storm. Layering cold sleeves, the sound of the storm, and the insect's voice—all felt from a wakeful bed—the poem portrays the loneliness of an autumn night. The same last line appears in 474, where the pine cricket sounded from the depths of dew in a garden without footprints; here it is set in a stormy night, depicting the same voice in a still scene of dew and a violent scene of storm.

Author

Ōe no Yoshitoki

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other