Asahi teru shima no mikado ni ōhoshiku hitooto mo seneba maura ganashi mo

朝日照る島の御門におほほしく
人音もせねばまうら悲しも

Roma-ji: Asahi teru shima no mikado ni ōhoshiku hitooto mo seneba maura ganashi mo
English Translation: In the Shima Palace
where the morning sun shines bright,
all is dim and still—
with no sound of people there,
my heart is filled with grief.
Meaning: The morning sun shines on the Shima Palace, yet all is hushed and gloomy, with no sound of people, and my heart is full of sorrow.
Commentary: Book Two Elegies 189

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Twenty-three poems composed in grief by the attendants of the Prince's palace"
The Shima Palace lies hushed under the morning sun with no sign of people, and the speaker is sad to the depths of his heart; the contrast of bright light and a silent palace carries his sense of loss.
According to the headnote, these are twenty-three poems composed in grief by the attendants who served in Prince Kusakabe's palace. A left note, citing the Nihon shoki, records that the prince died in the fourth month of the third year of Empress Jitō's reign (689). The sequence takes up, scene by scene, the laments of the attendants: the garden and ponds of the Shima Palace bereft of their master, and the night watches they kept on the hills of Mayumi and Sada where the prince lay in state. This is the nineteenth poem of the sequence.
The authors were the attendants who served in Prince Kusakabe's palace, and their individual names have not come down to us. Toneri were officials who served close to the Emperor and members of the imperial family as guards and aides. One theory holds that Kakinomoto no Hitomaro composed the poems in the attendants' voice, but this is not settled.

The first line, "asahi teru," is the same first line as the seventh poem, 177, and the twenty-second, 192.
The second line, "shima no mikado ni," means "at the Shima Palace," a phrase also found in the third poem, 173.
The third line, "ōhoshiku," means "dim and desolate," also used in the fifth poem, 175.
In the fourth line, "hitooto mo seneba," ne is the perfective form of zu and ba marks a cause: since there is no sound of people.
In the final line, "maura ganashi mo," ma is a prefix and ura means the heart: sad to the core.
Source: Manyoshu
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