蔭ひろみ頼みし松や枯れにけむ
下葉散りゆく年の暮かな
下葉散りゆく年の暮かな
- Roma-ji
-
Kage hiromi tanomishi matsu ya karenikemu
shitaba chiriyuku toshi no kure kana - English Translation
-
That pine we relied
on for the breadth of its shade—
has it withered then?
Here at year's end the lower
leaves are going, one by one
- Meaning
- Has the pine we trusted for its broad shade withered away? Its lower leaves are scattering, here at the end of the year.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
In the tenth month the Retired Emperor Kiritsubo's illness grew grave, and on the first of the eleventh he died. When the forty-nine days had passed the consorts left the palace one after another, and Fujitsubo moved to the Sanjo residence. On the twentieth of the twelfth month, a windy day with snow blowing, Prince Hyobu, come to escort her, saw the lower branches of the five-needled pine in the garden gone brown and spoke this poem. It moved Genji deeply, and he answered.
"For the breadth of its shade" is the shelter a protector gives. The pine is the late Emperor, and its death is his. "The lower leaves scattering" are the people now left without a patron and dispersing. One withered pine in front of them carries both the death and the family's prospects; the text itself calls the poem nothing much, and the moment gives it its force.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Whether at the waves of the Suzuka's shallows my sleeves wet or not, who will there be to send me a thought as far as Ise
- I would gaze after the way that she has gone now— so this autumn, mists, do not stand between me and the hill of Osaka there
- In the clear surface of this pond, a mirror froze over and cloudless, not to see the face that I used to see is a sad thing
- The year comes to its end, the rock spring's water too is bound shut with ice, and the faces we once saw are fading away as well