Am I to pass all
of this life of mine like this,
grieving as I go,
with never once an hour when
the heart in me may be eased
- Meaning
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Am I to spend my whole life this way, grieving, with never an hour when the heart is eased?
- Commentary
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Part One: Sakaki
Genji answered her poem with this one. Leaving in disquiet through the mist of a moonlit daybreak, dressed down and careful as he was, he was still beyond compare to look at. The Fujiwara Lesser Captain, brother of the Joganden Consort, saw him from behind a screen fence. Genji passed by without knowing it, and the sighting would later be used against him.
"Nagekitsutsu" is grieving without stop. "My world" is his whole life. "The heart being eased" plays on the verb for day breaking, taking up her "day has come." A poem spoken on the morning after a meeting, it says nothing at all of joy and casts the matter as a lifelong grief—the exhaustion of a man piling one forbidden love on another.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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