Aki wa waga kokoro no tsuyu ni aranedomo mono nagekashiki koro ni mo aru kana - Shui Wakashu(English Translation & Meaning)

秋は我が心の露にあらねども
物嘆かしき頃にもあるかな

Roma-ji: Aki wa waga kokoro no tsuyu ni aranedomo mono nagekashiki koro ni mo aru kana
English Translation: Autumn is not dew
that settles upon my heart,
and yet all the same
this is a season when I find
myself sighing, full of grief.
Meaning: Autumn is not the dew upon my heart, and yet how it is a season full of sighs and sorrow.
Commentary: Book Twelve Love Poems II 776

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Topic unknown"
The poem says that though autumn is not the dew that settles on the heart, it is somehow a season full of sighs. Dew, which suggests tears, belongs to autumn, but though autumn itself is no dew of the heart, in this season the heart sinks into sorrow of its own accord, so the poem lays the gloom of love over the melancholy of autumn. It takes up the dew of the autumn night in the preceding poem, 774.
This is the closing poem of the book. Where the opening poem, 698, began love's sorrow with a groundless name growing in the spring meadow, the close ends with the sighs of autumn, so that the book's beginning and end answer each other in seasonal imagery moving from spring to autumn.

First line, "aki wa waga," means "autumn, my."
Second line, "kokoro no tsuyu ni," means "the dew upon my heart," the dew suggesting tears. It shares autumn dew with the first line of 774, "tsuyu dani mo."
Third line, "aranedomo," means "though it is not," with "ne" the perfective form of the negative "zu" and "domo" concessive.
Fourth line, "mono nagekashiki," means "somehow full of sighs," with "mono" a prefix adding a vague sense.
Final line, "koro ni mo aru kana," means "what a season it is," with "kana" exclamatory. Like the final line of the opening poem, 698, "hito no shiranu yo," it ends in exclamation, closing the book by moving from the sorrow of spring to the sorrow of autumn.
Author: Unknown Poet
Source: Shui Wakashu
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