A feeling I have
never known in all the world
is on me, having
lost the dawn moon's going in
among the reaches of sky
- Meaning
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A feeling I have never known in this world is on me, having lost the dawn moon's course somewhere in the wide sky.
- Commentary
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Part One: Hana no En
Genji had inquiries made around the Kokiden for some clue to who the woman had been, but nothing certain came of it. The fan they had exchanged was painted with a hazy moon reflected in water, and looking at it his longing grew. He wrote this poem on that fan and kept it by him. Afterward he went to the Nijo residence and was pleased to see how Murasaki no Ue had grown, but at the bottom of his mind he was still thinking of the woman of that dawn.
"Ariake no tsuki" is the moon still in the sky at daybreak, standing for the woman. "Lost among the sky" means losing sight of something as it blurs into the heavens, laying her disappearance directly onto the moon's course. The blunt statement of feeling comes in the first three lines and the last two turn to landscape, so that his fixation on a nameless woman is gathered into the single image of a moon he cannot find. The moon that runs through this chapter appears here at its plainest.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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