ひき連れて葵かざししそのかみを
思へばつらし賀茂の瑞垣
思へばつらし賀茂の瑞垣
- Roma-ji
-
Hikitsurete aoi kazashishi sonokami o
omoeba tsurashi Kamo no mizugaki - English Translation
-
When I think back on
that time we came in a train
with hollyhock worn,
it is hard to bear it now,
this sacred fence at Kamo
- Meaning
- Remembering the time we rode here in procession with hollyhock in our caps, I find this sacred fence at Kamo hard to look on.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
On the way to the northern hills the party came within sight of the Lower Kamo Shrine. Among the attendants was a Lieutenant of the Right Guards who had once served as a temporary escort on the day of the purification. Stripped of his post for his association with Genji and left with nowhere to go, he had joined the retinue. Dismounting to lead the horse, he remembered that day and spoke this poem. Genji, thinking what it must cost him, dismounted too and made his reverence at the shrine.
"Coming in a train" is the splendid procession of the Kamo festival. "With hollyhock worn" summons the festival scene of the Aoi chapter directly. "Sono kami" is that former time. "Mizugaki" is the fence around a shrine, and the poem sets a shrine that has not changed against men whose circumstances have. That the fall from splendor is told from the vantage of a single retainer caught in his master's ruin gives the poem its weight.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The ones I once knew are gone, and those who remain grieve—at the world's end I pass my days weeping, with nothing gained by leaving it
- At that first parting I thought all grief had been used up and gone from me, and here again the sorrow of this world has grown the more
- From this wretched world I now take my leave, and go, leaving the name that stays behind me in the hands of the god of Tadasu
- How does he look on me now, that departed soul— and even the moon I gaze at, likening it to him, has gone behind cloud