The sixth poem in our series dedicated to Valentine’s Day is one of hidden love:

Japanese	Romanization	Translation
あさぢじふうの	Asajiu no	Though I reveal my love
小お野のしの原	Ono no shinohara	as sparingly as the sparse reeds
忍ぶれど	Shinoburedo	that grow in low bamboo fields,
あまりてなどか	Amarite nado ka	it overwhelms me—why is it
人の恋こいしき	Hito no koishiki	that I must love her so?

The author of the poem was Sangi Hitoshi (参議等, 880-951, “Counselor Hitoshi”), also known as Minamoto no Hitoshi. According to Mostow, he held many provincial posts, but is lesser known in the poetry world. Apparently the poem was sent to a woman, and is a fine specimen of love poetry.

The poem, when read aloud in Japanese, has a nice sound to it, owing to the way that shinohara and shinobu repeat, but also the poem has a nice contrast to it. According to Professor Mostow, the fourth line reverses the idea of scarcity with talk of being overwhelmed by love creating a kind of balance in the poem.

Hopefully the girl was impressed. 😉

One final note: the poem alludes to a couple plants of note:

• one is chigaya (茅, Cogongrass, imperata cylindrica), which in the poem is called asajiu.
• the other is a kind of thin bamboo grass called shinodaké (篠竹, pleioblastus simonii?), more commonly know as medaké in modern Japanese. The featured photo at the top of this post is an example of An example of pleioblastus simoni (photo by I, KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The scene described in the poem is a mixed field with taller bamboo grass poking out above a field of shorter reed grass.