While the young grasses
end is not yet to be seen,
how can it be that
the dew should already make
ready to fade and be gone

Meaning

While no one can yet see where this young grass will grow, how could the dew already be making ready to vanish?

Commentary

Part One: Wakamurasaki

　Hearing the nun's poem, a woman attending her answered through tears with this one. She gently checks her mistress's talk of dying, telling her that with so much still ahead she should not speak so. Listening beyond the fence, Genji was touched by the delicacy of feeling in that household, and his interest in the girl deepened further.

　"Young grass" here takes up the nun's own word and returns it, as the etiquette of poetic exchange required. The dew again stands for the nun, so that the two poems correspond exactly within one image. Where the nun lamented having no sky to vanish into, this one asks how the dew could vanish at all—a neat instance of reusing a word and reversing its sense. The poem carries the closeness between mistress and attendant.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

While the young grasses end is not yet to be seen, how can it be that the dew should already make ready to fade and be gone

While the young grasses
end is not yet to be seen,
how can it be that
the dew should already make
ready to fade and be gone