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Audio: NHK Creative Library
Read by LibriVox volunteer Larry Wilson.
Audio courtesy of LibriVox (Public Domain).
後京極摂政前太政大臣
きりぎりす
鳴くや霜夜の
さむしろに
衣かたしき
ひとりかも寝む
ころもかた
しきひとり
かもねむ
きり
- Poem 91
- きりぎりす
鳴くや霜夜の
さむしろに
衣かたしき ひとりかも寝む
Author: Gokyōgoku Regent and former Chancellor of the Realm (1169–1206)
Source: Shin Kokin Wakashū, Autumn
- English Verse Translation
- I'm sleeping all alone, and hear The crickets round my head; So cold and frosty is the
night, That I across the bed My koromo have spread.
— William N. Porter, 1909
- Modern Translation
- On a cold, frosty night, the cricket cries. Lying alone with one sleeve folded beneath me — how lonely it is.
- Commentary
- This poem was composed by Kujō Yoshitsune, expressing the loneliness of sleeping alone on an autumn night after the loss of his wife. In those days, when a man and woman slept together, each would spread out the other's robe as a kind of pillow — so the phrase "spreading only my own robe" was a conventional way of expressing sleeping alone.
- About the Poet
- The Gokyōgoku Regent and former Chancellor of the Realm, Kujō Yoshitsune, was a grandson of the Lay Novice of Hosshō-ji Temple, former Kampaku and Chancellor of the Realm, Fujiwara no Tadamichi (Poem 76), and the second son of Kujō Kanezane. He inherited headship of the Kujō family after his elder brother Yoshimichi died young at twenty-two. He became Regent to Emperor Tsuchimikado and reached the height of his career as Senior First Rank Regent and Chancellor of the Realm — but just two years later, at only thirty-eight, he died before his own father Kanezane. According to one theory, he was assassinated in his sleep, stabbed through the ceiling with a spear.
- Gokyōgoku Regent and former Chancellor of the Realm's Chart of the Heart
-
A chart and a modern-language reflection of the poet's inner feelings.
The Poet's Feelings (A Personal Interpretation)
Only the cricket's cry
announces this lonely night.Lying here with just one thin robe spread beneath me,
I feel the full weight of a love now lost.
- Poem Illustration
-
This image is based on an illustration from William N. Porter's A Hundred Verses from Old Japan, his 1909 English translation of the Hyakunin Isshu published in England, colorized and reworked using Adobe Firefly (generative AI).