夕露に袖濡らせとやひぐらしの
鳴くを聞く聞く起きて行くらむ
鳴くを聞く聞く起きて行くらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Yūtsuyu ni sode nurase to ya higurashi no
naku o kiku kiku okite yukuramu - English Translation
-
Is it that my sleeves
should be wet with evening dew?
Hearing, as you hear,
the cicada crying now,
you rise all the same and go
- Meaning
- Is it that my sleeves should be wet with the evening dew? Hearing the cicada cry as you do, you rise all the same and go.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Wakana Ge
Genji, who had spent his days nursing Murasaki no Ue, came at last to see the Third Princess at Rokujo. Her conscience troubled her, and she could not look him in the face. Toward evening he took his leave to return to Nijo. She spoke this poem then, and he answered and went out. The next morning, rising early to set off, he found Kashiwagi's letter under her cushion. It was this visit that brought the affair to light.
"Evening dew" is the dew that settles at dusk, and it stands for tears. The cicada is the one that cries at nightfall and carries the loneliness of the hour. "Rise and go" is getting up to leave, and the verb sounds the word for dew settling. Evening is when a man should be arriving, not leaving, and the poem is a complaint about the hour of his going. She says none of that outright and puts it into the insect's cry and the dew—though what makes the poem difficult is that she herself has something to hide.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- How long can it last, this while in which it stays on without vanishing— no more than a lotus dew that happens to have settled
- Let us make it now, a promise for beyond this world as well: never let the heart come between us, like dew set as beads on lotus
- And how does the house that waits for me hear it too? On this side and that it sets the heart astir, this voice of the evening cicada
- Could I hear of your fisher's life as a thing apart? The one who let fall brine at the shore of Suma was no other man than I