Gathering it all,
on a snow-threatening night
when the past is dear,
the mandarin duck at its
floating sleep adds its sad note.
- Meaning
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Gathering it all together, on this snow-threatening night when the past is dear, the mandarin duck at its floating sleep adds its own note of sorrow.
- Commentary
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Part One: Asagao
Following Murasaki's "locked under ice," Genji spoke this poem. As she gazed out with her face slightly turned, her look seemed of a sudden to resemble the late Fujitsubo, and Genji was so moved that he drew back the heart he had parceled out to other women. Just then a mandarin duck on the pond gave a cry, and he sang that on this snowy night, dear with the past, that voice added the more to the sorrow. Longing for days gone by and feeling for the Murasaki before him melt together in the quiet scene of the snowy night.
"Gathering it all" means drawing many things into one, this and that. "When the past is dear" is: when one longs for the old days. "Snow-threatening" is a sky that looks like snow, a night of coming snow. "Adds its sorrow" is to deepen the wistful mood the more. "The mandarin duck at its floating sleep" is the duck that sleeps afloat on the water, where "ukine" plays on "floating sleep" and "sorrowful note," its plaintive cry. On a snowy night of longing for the past, the duck's floating-sleep cry adds to the sorrow—a poem entrusting the longing for bygone days to the still winter scene.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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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.
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On a winter night,
no easy sleep, and waking
lonely—how brief was
that dream, all tangled and choked,
that came and was gone so soon.
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Though I give myself
to the heart that longs for the
dead, will I but stray,
not seeing her, at the fords—
the three fords—of that river?