この春は柳の芽にぞ玉はぬく
咲き散る花の行方知らねば
咲き散る花の行方知らねば
- Roma-ji
-
Kono haru wa yanagi no me ni zo tama wa nuku
sakichiru hana no yukue shiraneba - English Translation
-
This spring it is on
the willow buds that the beads
are strung one by one,
since I do not know where the
flowers that bloomed and fell have gone
- Meaning
- This spring the beads are strung along the willow buds, for I do not know where the flowers that bloomed and fell have gone.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Kashiwagi
The Ichijo lady answered Yugiri's poem with this one. Told that the cherry has bloomed as ever, she says that here there is nothing but weeping, and lets out her fear for her daughter's future. The Princess had lost her husband and was left with her mother and no one to stand behind her. This mother's anxiety is one of the doors through which Yugiri comes further in. Afterward he went on to the house of Kashiwagi's father, the retired minister.
"Beads strung along the willow buds" is dew threaded on a branch like a string of jewels, and it is a way of speaking of tears. "The flowers that bloomed and fell" are cherry blossoms gone almost as soon as they came—Kashiwagi, dead young, and also her daughter, whose course is now uncertain. "I do not know where they have gone" is not knowing what lies ahead. Taking his cherry and turning to a willow, she keeps to the same spring scene and pulls it over to the side of grief.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- If someone should ask in whose reign the seed of it was sown, how would the pine that has taken its root in the rock make an answer
- When the season comes round, it puts on the same hue and blooms as before— even the cherry of a house where one branch has withered off
- Wet with the droplets that fall from under the tree, I wear it backward— this robe of haze that has come to me in the spring this year
- Even the dead man cannot have thought of it—that, casting you aside, he would leave you to put on this haze of the evening