The young horse that lays
its reflection beside yours
as the grebes do—when
would it ever be drawn off
and parted from the sweet flag?
- Meaning
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When would the young horse, that lays its reflection beside yours as the grebes do, ever be drawn away and parted from the sweet flag?
- Commentary
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Part One: Hotaru
This is Genji's reply. A pair of poems with no reserve in them, the narrator remarks. He said, half in jest, that though theirs was not a life of mornings and evenings together, it rested him to see her; and since she was of an easy temper he spoke quietly and at length. She gave him the bed and lay down herself behind a curtain-stand. Having long since given up any thought that she might lie near him, she made no move, and he did not press her.
"Nihodori" is the grebe, whose pairs keep close together and which therefore stands for conjugal harmony. "Lays its reflection beside" is to set two images side by side on the water. The young horse is Genji, the sweet flag the lady—both taken straight from her own poem. In "hikiwakaru" the "hiki" again plays on drawing up the flag and leading the horse, answering her pivot; and the question is rhetorical: never. Pairing sweet flag with young horse on this day has precedent in older poems, and borrowing that pattern he warrants that nothing between them will change. And yet they sleep apart; the quiet distance between the words and the fact hangs over this pair of poems.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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Brought up into sight,
it only looks the shallower—
that root, that weeping,
borne along and carried off
with no telling one from another
-
Even the horse, they
say, will not touch this grass—the
sweet flag at the edge
of the water. Was it drawn
up, then, only for today?
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At my wits' end I
searched the traces of old tales,
but nowhere is there
any match for this—a child
who turns against her parent
-
I searched the traces
of the old tales, and truly,
as you said, found none—
nowhere in this world a parent
whose heart was such as yours