Even on an evening
when the wind is up and clouds
run and mass and blur,
there is not a moment when
I forget, or can forget, you
- Meaning
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Even on an evening when the wind is up and the clouds run and blur together, there is not a moment when I forget you, or could.
- Commentary
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Part One: Nowaki
Having gone the rounds in his father's train, Yugiri was out of spirits, and vexed that the day had worn on without his writing the letter he wanted to write; so he stopped at the Akashi girl's rooms. She was still with Murasaki, he was told. When he asked her nurse for paper and an inkstone, what came out of the girl's own cabinet was a roll of paper and the lid of her inkstone; he said it was too fine for him, then reflected that, considering her mother's station, it would do, and took up the brush. On thin violet paper, rubbing the ink carefully and eyeing the tip of his brush, he wrote slowly and with great attention—and looked, in all this, entirely the part. His poem, however, the narrator observes without mercy, was oddly conventional and poorly made. He tied it to a stem of kayagrass blown about by the storm and had it carried to Kumoinokari.
"The wind is up" and "the clouds run and blur" simply set down the storm of the night before. "Not a moment when I forget, or could forget" doubles the word for forgetting to say how unremitting his feeling is. Plain it certainly is; but there is no pivot, no figure, only scene and feeling laid side by side, and little resonance. The kayagrass he happened on may carry the sense of an old poem about a sober man who at last means to be in disorder; but the women only teased him that the Captain of Katano would at least have matched the color of his paper. The poem shows exactly how clumsy this most earnest of young men is in the arts of love.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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In this wild disorder
of wind, the maiden flower
feels itself about
to wither quite away and
be finished, and be gone
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Had it only bent
to the dew beneath the tree,
the maiden flower
would not have been left to wither
in the roughness of the wind
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On Oshio hill,
where the snow lies deep, the pheasant
rises and leaves tracks—
follow, today, those old tracks,
and look for what went before
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Among the pine groves
of Oshio, where the snow
lies deep, has there been
any track before today
to match the one made today?