身こそかくしめの外なれそのかみの
心のうちを忘れしもせず
心のうちを忘れしもせず
- Roma-ji
-
Mi koso kaku shime no hoka nare sonokami no
kokoro no uchi o wasure shi mo sezu - English Translation
-
My body is thus
now outside the sacred rope,
yet the heart I held
within me in those days of
old I have not once forgotten
- Meaning
- My body is now outside the sacred rope, yet the heart I held within me in those old days I have never once forgotten.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Eawase
Hearing that the contest would be held before the Emperor, the Suzaku Retired Emperor sent paintings to the Umetsubo Consort, the former Priestess. Among scrolls of the year's ceremonies, some with the Engi Emperor's own brush, and scrolls of his own reign, the rite at the great hall on the day of her descent to Ise had been painted with particular care. Set in a fine box of aloeswood, added to the sacred scene of the imperial palanquin drawn up at the hall, this poem was written. She answered.
"My body is thus outside the sacred rope" plays "shime," the rope that bounds a sacred place: her past as a servant of the gods and his own present, retired and outside affairs. "Sono kami" is that time, chosen for its link with the gods, meaning the descent to Ise. "The heart within" is his inmost feeling. Like the comb poem of the first section it has the farewell-comb rite of the Sakaki chapter behind it, and a retired sovereign entrusts his unchanged feeling to a picture.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Rather than sitting alone and grieving, I should have looked on it thus— the shore, laid out like this, where the fisherfolk make their home
- More even than at the time I knew that wretched grief, today once more the tears turn back toward the days that are gone and past now
- Within the sacred rope it feels no longer as it was in the past, and those days of the gods' age now, even now, I long for
- Changed in this body, I have come back alone to the hills, where the wind through the pines blows with a sound like the one I knew before