これや見し昔住みけん跡ならん
蓬が露に月のかかれる
蓬が露に月のかかれる
- Roma-ji
-
Kore ya mishi mukashi sumiken ato naran yomogi ga tsuyu ni tsuki no kakareru
- English Translation
-
Can this be the place
I saw, where long ago
someone must have lived?
On the dew upon the mugwort
the moonlight rests.
- Meaning
- Is this, I wonder, the place I once saw, where someone lived long ago? The moonlight rests on the dew upon the mugwort.
- Commentary
-
Book Seventeen Miscellaneous Poems II 1682
Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "When I composed a hundred-poem sequence."
This is the third poem of the sequence on a ruined old home. Seeing moonlight resting on the dew upon the mugwort, the poet wonders whether this is the site he once saw where someone lived long ago. According to the headnote, it was composed for a hundred-poem sequence.
The author, "Saigyō Hōshi," was named Satō Norikiyo in lay life. A guard in the service of Retired Emperor Toba, he took holy orders at the age of twenty-three.
The first line, "kore ya mishi," means "is this what I once saw?" "Ya" is an interrogative particle.
The second line, "mukashi sumiken," means "where someone must have lived long ago." "Ken" expresses conjecture about the past.
The third line, "ato naran," means "can it be the site?" The particle "ya" is closed by the attributive form of "n," and the poem breaks here after the third line.
The fourth line, "yomogi ga tsuyu ni," means "on the dew upon the overgrown mugwort." Mugwort is sung as a grass that grows thick in the gardens of ruined houses.
The last line, "tsuki no kakareru," means "the moonlight rests." Taking up "tsuki ni nokoreru hito no omokage" of the preceding poem, it depicts moonlight alone resting unchanged on a wasteland with no trace of people, closing the sequence on a ruined old home.
- Author
- Saigyō
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Prev Poem
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Furusato wa asaji ga sue ni narihatete tsuki ni nokoreru hito no omokage
- Next Poem
-
Kage ni tote tachikakurureba karagoromo nurenu ame furu matsu no koe kana