Though I leave this house
now, saying that all is over,
you, pillar of cypress
that I have known so long—do not,
do not forget me here
- Meaning
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Though I leave this house now, saying all is over, do not forget me, pillar of cypress that I have known so long.
- Commentary
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Part One: Makibashira
Out of patience at last, Prince Shikibu sent for his daughter and her children while the Commander was away. It was an evening with the light failing and a sky that looked like snow. The young men who had come to fetch them urged haste, and the lady gazed out, wiping her eyes. The girl, her father's darling, could not bear to go without seeing him—to leave without a word of parting and perhaps never meet again—and lay face down and would not stir. Her mother talked her round; she waited, hoping he might come even now, but at that hour there was no chance of it. It grieved her to give up to strangers the eastern pillar she had always leaned against, and so she wrote a few words on paper of dark cypress color and pushed it with the point of her hairpin into a crack in the wood. This is the poem.
"Maki" is cypress or other fine timber. "To leave the house" is to go from where one has lived. "Known so long" is all the years she spent leaning there, put into a single word. It is said to draw on Michizane's poem to his plum tree—send me your fragrance on the east wind, and do not forget the spring though your master is gone—borrowing the form in which one leaving speaks to the things of the house. That she addresses a pillar rather than a person shows a child's heart with nowhere else to turn; and that she could not finish writing for weeping makes it harder still. From this poem she is called Makibashira, and the chapter takes its name.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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