Though we were pulled apart
and the years have gone by since,
could the warbler ever
forget the root of the pine
from which it once took wing?
- Meaning
-
Though we were pulled apart and the years have gone by, could the warbler ever forget the root of the pine from which it took wing?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Hatsune
This is the girl's answer to her mother. Saying that here was no one to grudge the first song to, Genji had the inkstone made ready and set her to write it herself. She was so pretty that even those who saw her morning and evening never had enough of looking; and it struck him as a cruel thing that her own mother should have gone all these years without seeing her. This answer would later draw from the lady of Akashi the poem "How rare a thing," written among her practice sheets.
"Pulled apart" answers her mother's "drawn toward," carrying on the pulling of the little pines. The warbler is herself; the root of the pine is her mother. "Could it forget?" is rhetorical: no, it could not. Where the mother wrote by way of the pine, the daughter simply turns the figure into the relation of pine and bird. But the narrator adds that, written as a child would write it, the poem does not run smoothly. That the unpolished phrasing of an eight-year-old is set down exactly as it stood is what gives the scene its feeling.
- Author
-
Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
-
Genji Monogatari
- Other
-