I should have let the
butterflies carry me off—
if you had not meant
to set between us the eightfold
hedge of the yamabuki
- Meaning
-
I should have let the butterflies carry me off to you—had you not meant to set the eightfold kerria between us.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Kocho
This is the Empress's answer. Reading it, she smiled to find it the reply to her own letter with the maples. The women who had been in the boats the day before were saying, with their eyes still on the flowers, that the colors of spring were not to be talked down after all. Warblers sang clear, the bird music rang out, the waterfowl on the pond called here and there, and when the piece quickened to its close the pleasure of it was not to be exhausted; the butterfly dance was lighter still, and the dancers came out beneath the flowers spilling over the kerria hedge. The Vice-Governor of the Empress's Household and the other courtiers passed the gifts along: robes of cherry for the bird children, of kerria for the butterflies. To the Captain who had carried the message a woman's set of robes was given, with a wisteria gown besides; and with it came this poem.
"Kocho" plays butterfly against "ko te fu," the words "come here." "I should have let myself be carried off" is: I would gladly have gone. "Eightfold kerria" is the double-flowered plant, with the sense of hills laid one behind another to keep two people apart. Since it answers the very person she had challenged the autumn before with her maples, the poem takes the form of conceding the match. The narrator, however, adds that even ladies so accomplished found this hard, and that neither poem seems to say all it wanted to—forestalling the objection that these are ordinary work for such hands. With that remark the contest of spring and autumn closes as something better than a contest: an exchange of courtesies.
- Author
-
Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
-
Genji Monogatari
- Other
-