A late Heian poet who inherited from his father Akisue the leadership of the Rokujō house, the first hereditary family of waka scholarship, and rose to the third rank as Master of the Left Capital. At the command of the retired Emperor Sutoku he compiled the Shikashū anthology in 1151. He continued his father's rite of veneration before a portrait of Hitomaro and, with his sons Kiyosuke and Shigeie, made the Rokujō school a major force in the poetic world. About eighty-five of his poems appear in imperial anthologies. His Hyakunin Isshu poem, on moonlight breaking through a rift in the autumn clouds, was written for Sutoku's hundred-poem sequences.
秋風に たなびく雲の 絶え間より
もれ出づる月の 影のさやけさ
Akikaze ni tanabiku kumo no taema yori / moreizuru tsuki no kage no sayakesa
Through a gap in the clouds trailing on the autumn wind, the moonlight streams out — how clear and bright it is.