女郎花萎るる野辺をいづことて
一夜ばかりの宿を借りけむ
一夜ばかりの宿を借りけむ
- Roma-ji
-
Ominaeshi shioruru nobe o izuko tote
hitoyo bakari no yado o karikemu - English Translation
-
Taking the meadow
where the maidenflower droops
for what sort of place,
did you come and borrow it
as lodging for a single night
- Meaning
- For what sort of place did you take this meadow where the maidenflower droops, that you borrowed it as lodging for a single night?
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Yugiri
When the priest told her that Yugiri had gone home at dawn, the Ichijo lady was appalled. For her daughter's sake she might have been willing to hand her into his keeping; but to come one night and then send nothing was to treat her as of no account. Struggling for breath, she took the brush herself and wrote him this poem. She collapsed as soon as it was finished. Worse, when the letter reached Yugiri's house his wife, Kumoinokari, snatched it away and hid it.
"Maidenflower" is one of the seven grasses of autumn and stands for a graceful woman—here the Princess. "Droops" is wilting, the state of a widow who has lost her strength. "For what sort of place" is a demand: what did he take the house to be? "Lodging for a single night" is a night's shelter, and it charges him with not coming back. A mother's desperate question is set into the restrained image of a flower in a field, and the poem is among the heaviest in the chapter.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- Having left my soul behind at your unfeeling sleeve, I find that I am lost, and it is my own heart that has bewildered me
- It is in the damming that the shallowness will show, like a mountain stream— if the name that flows downstream cannot be kept wrapped up now
- I did part my way through the thick grasses of the autumn field, and yet did I ever knot the grass into a pillow for sleep
- Knowing it for what, am I to give you comfort? Is it the living one you long for, or the one who is gone that grieves you so