A thousand autumns—
Could they face a single spring?
Yet even so still,
Both the crimson autumn leaves
And the blossoms fall alike.
- Meaning
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Could even a thousand autumns compare with a single spring? Yet both the crimson autumn leaves and the blossoms must fall all the same.
- Commentary
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94. Autumn Nights
There was once a man who, for some reason, had stopped going to visit a woman. The woman later took another man, yet because she had a child with the former man, she still sent him occasional messages, though they were no longer intimate.
The woman was skilled at painting, and at the former man’s request she had gone to paint a picture for him. Yet when the day came, she was delayed by a day or two because her present lover had come to visit. The former man felt bitter about this.
The poem was composed in reply by the woman to the former man’s ironic poem:
“In autumn nights long
Do they forget the spring days?
Is it perhaps so?
Does the autumn mist surpass
Spring’s soft haze a thousandfold?”
In the former man’s poem, he likened himself to spring and the new man to autumn, implying that she must now prefer the new man to him. The woman’s reply follows the same metaphor.
Even if a thousand autumns were gathered together, they could not equal a single spring—meaning that even many present lovers cannot equal the man she loved before. Yet, no matter how one praises or belittles them, both the former man and the present man will in the end leave her and pass away from her life, just as both blossoms and autumn leaves must fall.
- Source
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Ise Monogatari
- Other
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