This heart that never
learned its lesson from your old
coldness—it is this
that, joined to your cruelty now,
weighs on me all the harder.
- Meaning
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This heart of mine, which never learned from your coldness long ago, joined now to your cruelty, weighs on me all the harder.
- Commentary
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Part One: Asagao
That night Genji pressed his suit on the lady Asagao more earnestly still, begging her to say just once, directly, "I will not"—that he might make it his cue to give her up. But the lady would not stir: even when her father the Prince had once wished the match, she had not accepted it, and now, past her bloom, she could hardly consent. Finding this too cruel, hard-hearted, Genji—as the night deepened and the wind grew wild—wiped away his tears in his forlornness and spoke this poem. Still she would not soften, and he withdrew with nothing gained.
"Coldness" is aloofness, an indifferent manner. "This heart that never learned from your old coldness" is his own heart, which took no warning from her past chill. "Your cruelty" is the lady's cold treatment of him. "Joined to" is: added to that. "Weighs the harder" is: is the more painful. He laments that his own heart, which loved on undeterred by her old coldness, now doubled with the coldness he meets again, is twice as hard to bear. Reproaching her while lamenting his own undeterred love—a poem of a bent and complicated feeling.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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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.
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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?
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Why now, all anew,
should I let myself be seen?
A change of heart, they
say, is a thing that befalls
other people's lives—not mine.
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Locked fast under ice,
the water among the stones
can scarcely make way,
while the clear moon in the sky
sheds its light and flows on by.