That soul now gone is
the sadder to me for this:
this bed where we slept,
and a heart so used to it
that it cannot wander free

Meaning

The soul that has gone grows sadder to me still, for my heart is too used to this bed we shared to drift away from it.

Commentary

Part One: Aoi

　On the day he left the Minister of the Left's house, Genji finished his leave-taking and went last of all through Aoi no Ue's rooms. The furnishings were as they had always been, and only her absence stood out. Near the inkstone by the curtained bed lay sheets of practice writing she had left, and he and the Minister took them up together. Beside a line of old verse she had copied, Genji wrote this poem.

　"The soul now gone" is the dead woman's. "Akugaru" is a soul leaving the body and drifting, a word used again and again in this chapter for Rokujo no Miyasudokoro's living spirit. The point here is that he reverses it and uses it for a heart that cannot leave. At the close of a chapter in which another's soul went wandering, he says his own cannot stir from a bed, and the same word set against itself sounds through the whole scene.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

That soul now gone is the sadder to me for this: this bed where we slept, and a heart so used to it that it cannot wander free

That soul now gone is
the sadder to me for this:
this bed where we slept,
and a heart so used to it
that it cannot wander free