Hyakunin Isshu: Meet the Poets
Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu Ason

Meaning

Like the fire tended by the palace guards, I burn at night and fade in the day — lost in endless longing.

Commentary

The "mikakimori" were the guards assigned to keep the sacred fires burning at the imperial palace gates. These fires burned brightly through the night, then were allowed to die back down in the day. The poet maps his own love onto this rhythm: intense and undeniable at night, suppressed and smoldering by day, but never truly extinguished.

Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu Ason was one of the celebrated "Thirty-six Poetry Immortals" of the mid-Heian period. He served as the head of the Ōnakatomi clan, which held hereditary responsibility for Shinto rites at the imperial court. His granddaughter was the gifted poet Ise no Taifu (poem 61). This poem appears in the Gosen Wakashū.

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