見し人の雨となりにし雲居さへ
いとど時雨にかき暮らすころ
いとど時雨にかき暮らすころ
- Roma-ji
-
Mishi hito no ame to narinishi kumoi sae
itodo shigure ni kakikurasu koro - English Translation
-
The very sky where
the one I knew has turned to
rain and gone from us
is darkened over the more
by these showers, this season
- Meaning
- The very sky into which the one I knew has turned to rain is darkened all the more by these showers now.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Aoi
Genji answered the Captain's poem with this one. The depth of feeling in it was plain to see, and the Captain understood that a man who had never seemed much attached had in fact valued his sister greatly. His own sense of loss grew keener. Afterward Genji had a pink picked from the withered garden and sent it to Omiya.
"The one I knew" is Aoi no Ue. "Turned to rain" takes up the Captain's own words, keeping the etiquette of exchange. "Kumoi," the sky, also runs on from Genji's earlier poem. "Kakikurasu" is both a sky going wholly dark and a heart closed up with grief. Rather than answer the question, he paints the same scene darker still, and that in itself shows a man in no state to be comforted.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The one who remains and the one who has vanished are one dew-like world, and to keep reserve in it is a frail thing, is it not
- Turned now into rain, in this sky of cold showers the drifting clouds go— and which of them am I to single out and look upon
- This pink that remains at the withered brushwood fence where the grasses die— I look on it as a sign of the autumn we parted
- To look at it now only rots my sleeves the more with the tears they take— this yamato pink beside a fence gone all to ruin