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

Taking the meadow where the maidenflower droops for what sort of place, did you come and borrow it as lodging for a single night

Taking the meadow
where the maidenflower droops
for what sort of place,
did you come and borrow it
as lodging for a single night