86. Saigyō Hōshi
O'ercome with pity for this world,My tears obscure my sight;I wonder, can it be the moonWhose melancholy lightHas saddened me to-night?
About this text
86. Saigyō Hōshi is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (the Hyaku-nin-isshiu), Internet Archive, the William N. Porter translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Various, 86. Saigyō Hōshi, in A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (1909), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hyakunin-isshu/86.html, id L28571.
Form and metre
86. Saigyō Hōshi is 5 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes xaxaa. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic trimeter.
See other poems in iambic trimeter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 xaxaa worldx · sighta · moonx · lighta · nighta
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| O'ercome with pity for this world, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| My tears obscure my sight; | 6 | ··˘/·· |
| I wonder, can it be the moon | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Whose melancholy light | 6 | ·/˘·˘· |
| Has saddened me to-night? | 6 | ·/˘··· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.