草枯れのまがきに残る撫子を
別れし秋のかたみとぞ見る
別れし秋のかたみとぞ見る
- Roma-ji
-
Kusagare no magaki ni nokoru nadeshiko o
wakareshi aki no katami to zo miru - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- This pink still standing by the withered fence I look on as a keepsake of the autumn that took her from us.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Aoi
After the Captain had gone, Genji had gentians and pinks picked from among the dead grasses and sent them to Omiya through Saisho no Kimi, the infant's nurse. This poem went with them. The pink stands for the baby, and the poem says that he looks on the motherless child as a keepsake. Receiving it, Omiya could not hold back her tears, and sent a poem in return.
"A brushwood fence where the grasses have died" gives the bleakness of the season directly. The pink has long been used for a small child, and here it is the newborn boy. "The autumn we parted" is the autumn that took Aoi no Ue, laying the season and the parting together. One flower left standing in a dead landscape answers exactly to a child left behind by its mother, and the whole situation is said without a word of explanation.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- This evening above all others my sleeve is wet with the dew of it, though I have passed through many autumns of grieving before