Poem by Tenchi Tennō

Poem by Tenchi Tennō is a landscape ukiyo-e print designed by Katsushika Hokusai around 1835 and held in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The sheet belongs to the unfinished series One Hundred Poems Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki), in which the aging Hokusai paired each verse of the famous classical anthology Hyakunin isshu with a pictorial commentary cast in the voice of a country wet nurse.

The poem at the head of this print is the opening verse of the anthology, attributed to the seventh-century Emperor Tenchi (Tenji). It evokes a farmer's makeshift hut in autumn, where the dew that drips through the loosely woven thatched roof falls upon the speaker's sleeves. Hokusai responds not with an aristocratic palace setting but with a broad agrarian panorama: peasants thresh and bundle rice in the foreground, others rest beneath a rough thatched shelter, and the rice fields stretch into a distance demarcated by stands of pine.

Formally, the composition layers multiple zones of activity into a single deep landscape, demonstrating the spatial ambition that distinguishes Hokusai's late work for Edo ukiyo-e publishers. Colors run cooler than in the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, with grey-greens, browns, and muted blues conveying the chill of late autumn, while bokashi gradations soften the sky.

The series ultimately ran to twenty-seven designs, falling well short of one hundred, and these surviving prints are now prized for the way they translate classical waka poetry into the visual idiom of late Edo ukiyo-e. Katsushika Hokusai's reading of the opening verse exemplifies his interpretive freedom and his sustained commitment to depicting rural labor with dignity.