Is it not the moon?
Is spring not the spring of former days?
Only my own self remains as I once was.
- Meaning
-
Is this not the same moon? Is this spring not the spring of former days? Only I alone remain as I once was, while all else has changed.
- Commentary
-
Episode Four: "Is it not the moon?"
Long ago, the Empress Dowager resided in a mansion facing Fifth Avenue in the Eastern Capital. In the western wing of that mansion lived a woman.
The man, though he knew the affair was improper, continued to meet her in secret. Around the tenth day of the New Year, the woman disappeared from the Fifth Avenue mansion, and though he learned where she was from others,
he could not go freely to the place, for it was not one he could visit in his ordinary station, and his longing only deepened into pain.
In the following year, when the plum blossoms were at their height, the man went to the house where the woman had once lived, only to realize with tears that the time he had spent with her had become the past.
He lay there until deep in the night, recalling the year before, and composed this poem.
Just as on the nights when they had met, the moon shone, the plum blossoms were fragrant, and the early-spring night bore the same air; and just as his feelings of love were unchanged from former days, the one difference—that the woman was no longer there—filled him with lonely desolation, and he wept.
The woman in question later became a consort of Emperor Seiwa, known as the Nijō Empress; her disappearance from the western wing was because she had entered the imperial harem.
This poem’s elevated tone has been highly praised, and since the Kamakura period it has been renowned as one of the celebrated poems of the Kokinshū.
- Source
-
Ise Monogatari
- Other
-