While was it, that here,
tangled at the mugwort's root,
a village of falling
snow, a fence gone all to ruin—
this home I once knew so well?
- Meaning
-
When did it happen—that this hedge I knew so well grew tangled at the mugwort's root, a village of falling snow gone all to ruin?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Asagao
On the pretext of calling on the Fifth Princess, Genji went out to the Momozono residence of Prince Shikibu on a snowy day. While the gatekeeper struggled to open the gate, its lock long rusted, Genji looked out over the ruined estate. What had seemed only yesterday, he felt, was already three years past; and he thought of himself, unable in this fleeting world to cast off the current life that is but a lodging, his heart still turning to the colors of trees and grass. Amid such musings he spoke this solitary poem, as if murmuring to himself.
"When was it" means at some point, unnoticed. "At the mugwort's root" is the base of the mugwort, standing for the weeds overgrowing the ruined garden. "Tangled" is the roots of the grass matting together and choking. "A village of falling snow" is an old village in falling snow, where "furu" plays on "to fall" and "to grow old." "The fence gone to ruin" is the ruined hedge. The home he once knew has become, unnoticed, an old place gone to ruin and overgrown with mugwort—a poem carrying his sense of time's passing and the world's impermanence.
- Author
-
Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
-
Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
-
The morning-glory
whose first sight I cannot once
forget—has the bloom,
the fullness of its flower,
now gone by and passed away?
-
Autumn at its end,
I cling tangled to the hedge
where the mist hangs low,
and barely there at all, I
fade—this morning-glory flower.
-
Though the years go by,
this bond I cannot forget—
that one word you spoke,
when you called me, so you did,
the parent of a parent.
-
When my body changes,
wait and watch even then—
for was there ever,
in this world, a single case
of a child forgetting a parent?