If she should go forth,
who then would find parting hard?
but beyond all past,
today’s grief surpasses all—
how sorrowful this day is.
- Meaning
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If she were to leave of her own will, who would find the parting so hard? Yet more than ever before, today is filled with sorrow.
- Commentary
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Episode Forty: "If she should go forth"
A certain young man had grown fond of a serving woman. His parents, meddlesome and severe, feared that their son would fall too deeply in love and sought to drive the woman away.
Yet because they were also her employers, they could not at once dismiss her.
The young man, dependent upon his parents and not yet independent, had no power to act as he wished, and the woman, being of low rank, had no strength to resist. Even so, their feelings for one another deepened day by day. At last, thinking they could endure it no longer, the parents drove the woman out.
The young man had no means to stop those who led her away, and he wept tears of blood.
This poem was composed by him as he wept.
Afterward, he fainted, causing his parents great distress. They had never imagined that he would lose consciousness over parting from the woman, and were thrown into confusion.
The tale concludes by saying that in former times young people suffered single-hearted loves as though staking their very lives; as for the old men of the present day, surely they do not. Yet the young man of that time is none other than the old man of the present.
- Source
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Ise Monogatari
- Other
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