Inamino no asaji oshinabe sanuru yo no kenagaku shi areba ie shi shinowayu

印南野の浅茅押しなべさ寝る夜の
日長くしあれば家し偲はゆ

Roma-ji: Inamino no asaji oshinabe sanuru yo no kenagaku shi areba ie shi shinowayu
English Translation: On Inami's plain,
pressing down the low cogon,
the nights that I sleep
have stretched on for many days,
and so my home comes to mind
Meaning: The nights I sleep on Inami's plain, pressing down the low cogon grass, have gone on for so many days that my home rises unbidden in my thoughts.
Commentary: Book Six Miscellaneous Poems 940

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Three envoys"
This poem tells of nights of travel spent on Inami's plain, sleeping on the flattened cogon grass, until home begins to seem dear. The long poem immediately before it (938) was composed by Yamabe no Akahito when he accompanied Emperor Shōmu on his progress to the plain of Inami in Harima in the ninth month of Jinki 3 (726), and it praises the bustle of fishermen catching tuna and boiling salt at the bay of Fujii, along with its pure white beach.
Where the long poem praises the site of the progress from a public standpoint, this envoy states frankly the private feelings of one on a journey. In poems composed on imperial progresses, it is a set pattern to follow the praise of the land with longing for home, and this poem stands within that tradition.
The poet, Yamabe no Akahito, was a court poet of the early Nara period who accompanied Emperor Shōmu on his progresses and left many poems of praise. He excelled at poems that depict natural scenery with clarity and calm, and later generations revered him, alongside Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, as a sage of poetry.

The three envoys follow a clear course: the preceding poem, 939, praises the boats bustling in the bay of Fujie; this poem longs for home out of the length of the journey; and the next poem, 941, imagines the joy of drawing near to home on the way back. The sequence moves from the praise of the long poem to the private feelings of the traveler.
The first line, "On Inami's plain," refers to the tableland stretching between the Kako and Akashi rivers in Harima, roughly today's Kakogawa and Akashi in Hyōgo Prefecture. The poem opens with the name of the place the emperor visited.
The second line, "pressing down the low cogon," means flattening the short grass, giving a concrete picture of making a makeshift bed on the open plain.
In the third line, "the nights that I sleep," the prefix "sa-" merely smooths the rhythm; the phrase means the nights of sleeping.
The fourth line, "have stretched on for many days," means that the days of the journey have grown long, with "shi" as an emphatic particle. Running to eight syllables, it is a hypermetric line, and it gives the reason for the longing stated in the final line.
In the final line, "and so my home comes to mind," "shi" is emphatic and "-yu" is a spontaneous auxiliary, meaning that home comes to mind of its own accord. It resonates with the final line of 943 in this book, "that I should not think of home," in the traveler's longing for home.
Author: Yamabe no Akahito
Source: Manyoshu
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