This sleeve of mine, dyed
deep in the crimson of tears—
is it to be named
and belittled as nothing
but the palest shade of green?
- Meaning
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Are they to look at this sleeve of mine, dyed deep in tears of blood, and dismiss it as nothing more than the pale green of the sixth rank?
- Commentary
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Part One: Otome
On the eve of the day the Minister of the Center meant to take Kumoinokari home, her nurse Saisho contrived matters so that Yugiri could see her at last. Ashamed and sick at heart, they wept without speaking; and when he asked whether she would miss him, the faint nod she gave was itself childlike. Then came the sound of the Minister returning, the outriders clearing the way, and the women fluttered in alarm. The girl trembled with fear, but the boy, half wishing to be caught, would not let go of her sleeve. Her nurse, coming to look for her and seeing how things stood, muttered—just audibly, from behind the screen—that however fine the young gentleman might be, a first match with a mere sixth-rank boy was hardly to be borne. Knowing himself despised for want of rank, Yugiri felt the world so bitter that even his longing cooled a little; and he put his humiliation straight into this poem for her to hear.
"Crimson tears" are tears of blood, wept in the extremity of grief, and the deeply dyed sleeve is the sleeve stained with them. "Pale green" is the light color worn by officials of the sixth rank, set against the depth of crimson so that shades of color stand for degrees of rank. "Iishioru" is to speak slightingly of, to disparage. Is a sleeve dyed so deep in love, he asks, to be talked down by a mere color of office? Though cast as a love poem, what it voices is anger at station, and the wounded pride of a boy held to the sixth rank rings through it. Many texts give the fourth line as "asamidori to ya."
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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The mourning robes went
on but yesterday, I thought,
and today already
the rite, the shallows—a world
that shifts and will not hold still
-
Deep in the night's heart,
wild geese cross calling for friends,
and upon that cry
the wind along the reed tops
adds its own bitter sighing
-
In color on color
I come to know how hard it is,
this lot of mine—
in what dye, then, was it steeped,
this robe that is our bond?
-
Frost and ice have set
so bitterly, and the sky
in the dark of dawn
I darken further still with
these tears of mine, falling, falling