If the wind that blows
and gathers to the flute's own
bamboo is the same,
then let it be handed down
to a root that runs long ages

Meaning

If the wind that gathers to the flute's bamboo is the same wind, then let it be handed down to a root that runs on through long ages.

Commentary

Part Two: Yokobue

　Yugiri brought the flute home, and that night, with his wife Kumoinokari out of temper with him, he lay down and could not sleep. Half dozing, he saw Kashiwagi come to him exactly as he had been in life, take up the flute, and look at it. The man he had meant it for, he said, was someone else. This poem was spoken in that dream. Waking, Yugiri thought of Kaoru, and the next day he went to the Rokujo residence and left the flute with Genji.

　"The flute's bamboo" is the cane a flute is cut from. "The same" also sounds the word for koto. "Long ages" carries the node of a bamboo inside the word for an age. "Root" is at once the note of the flute and the root of a plant, and it means descendants. Bamboo, node, root, and note run through the whole while the poem asks that the flute go to his own child, so that the existence of Kaoru is pointed to without being named—a poem that carries real weight.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

If the wind that blows and gathers to the flute's own bamboo is the same, then let it be handed down to a root that runs long ages

If the wind that blows
and gathers to the flute's own
bamboo is the same,
then let it be handed down
to a root that runs long ages