Kokinshu #184

[lnhammer]

Topic unknown.

    When I see moonlight
filtering through the spaces
    between the bare trees,
I realize it has come,
the melancholy autumn.

—30 December 2011

Original author unknown. This appears in Ono no Komachi's collected poetry, but the attribution is considered doubtful as that was compiled some generations after her death. I concur with the doubt here, as it reads nothing like her other poems in anything but emotional tone. Sequencewise, now that we are over the surprise arrival of autumn, it it time to sorrow over it. Melancholy sparked by barren branches is a trope borrowed from China; Japanese poets borrowed the seasonal response but largely transferred the stimulus to the changing leaves, which are basically never mentioned in Chinese poems. That the trees here are "bare" is not in the original but implied by the gaps.


ko no ma yori
mori-kuru tsuki no
kage mireba
kokorozukushi no
aki wa kinikeri

---L.