The smoke that has climbed
and gone I cannot tell out
from the rest of it,
and yet the whole of the sky
where the clouds are moves my heart

Meaning

I cannot tell which of it is the smoke that rose, and so the whole of the clouded sky moves me.

Commentary

Part One: Aoi

　After bearing a son, Aoi no Ue seemed for a time to be out of danger, but while Genji was at the palace she suddenly failed and died. For two or three days they kept watch over her, and then the funeral came and she was carried to Toribeno. Returning at daybreak past the twentieth of the eighth month, after a night of rites, Genji looked up at the sky and spoke this poem. Afterward he stayed on at the Minister of the Left's house in mourning.

　"The smoke that rose" is the smoke of the pyre, and the poem states plainly that it cannot be picked out. "Kumoi" is the sky where the clouds are, so that the dead woman's whereabouts widen into the whole of it. Because nothing can be identified, everything is sad—and by that turn one death opens into a larger feeling. It is an elegy that never states its emotion directly, resting entirely on how the scene is taken in.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

The smoke that has climbed and gone I cannot tell out from the rest of it, and yet the whole of the sky where the clouds are moves my heart

The smoke that has climbed
and gone I cannot tell out
from the rest of it,
and yet the whole of the sky
where the clouds are moves my heart