Brought up into sight,
it only looks the shallower—
that root, that weeping,
borne along and carried off
with no telling one from another
- Meaning
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Brought up into sight, the water only looks the shallower—that root, that weeping, carried along with no telling one thing from another.
- Commentary
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Part One: Hotaru
This is her reply. Genji, having urged her to answer that day of all days, went out; and when her women too pressed her, she wrote this—whatever she may have been thinking—in a faint hand, adding only the words "how childish." The Prince, being a man of taste, will have wished her writing a little more distinguished. Scented balls, wonderfully made, arrived that day in numbers from every quarter. Tamakazura, whose present life bore no mark of the hardships of her earlier years, had come to have room in her heart, and had begun to wish that if it could be managed she might come through all this without wounding anyone.
"Brought up into sight" is to rise above the water. "Looks the shallower" is that once what lay hidden appears, the shallowness of the water is plain—and so, she says, is the shallowness of his feeling. "With no telling one from another" plays the sweet flag against "ayame," the power to tell one thing from another. "Nakare" and "ne" are the same pivots he had used. Using every word of his poem and reversing only the sense, she pushes it back at him as shallow—very neatly done. And that Tamakazura, who had refused all along to answer, has taken up her brush at all marks a change in her.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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