Into that small boat
the people of Ise row
over the waves' backs
I would have climbed, had I not
had this bitter weed to cut

Meaning

I would have got into the little boat the Ise people row across the waves, if only there had been no bitter weed to cut.

Commentary

Part One: Suma

　Genji answered her letter with this poem. Coming when it did, the letter made even the messenger seem like a friend, and he kept the man two or three days to hear news of Ise. His reply says that had he known he would come to be cut off from the world like this, he would have gone down to Ise in her train. This is one of two poems enclosed with it.

　"Ise people" is her party, gone down to Ise. "Ukime" takes up her own word and carries the pun on seaweed and hardship forward. "Without cutting" means without meeting that hardship. Where she wrote of the bitterness she gathers at Ise, he answers that he would have boarded the boat and left it uncut—keeping the same pun while turning it into a counterfactual.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

Into that small boat the people of Ise row over the waves' backs I would have climbed, had I not had this bitter weed to cut

Into that small boat
the people of Ise row
over the waves' backs
I would have climbed, had I not
had this bitter weed to cut