From this day, when I
change into something thin as
a feathered robe, this
world of the cast-off cicada
grows sadder to me by far
- Meaning
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From this day, when I change into something thin as a feathered robe, this cast-off-cicada world grows sadder to me by far.
- Commentary
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Part Two: Maboroshi
Genji answered Hanachirusato's poem with this one. From today, in thin summer cloth, he says, how little the world holds comes home to him—meeting the care with which she had invited him to remember. All that year, at every seasonal observance, he was made to feel Murasaki no Ue's absence, and he set it down in verse. The exchange with Hanachirusato is one of the few untroubled ones in the whole of it.
"A feathered robe" is the thin garment of the celestial beings, standing for the lightness of summer cloth. "Change into something thin" takes up her "cut and changed." "The cast-off-cicada world" is a world as insubstantial as an empty shell, and the phrase is a standing epithet for the word world. Thinness and the cicada both belong with the feathered robe. From one detail of clothing the poem carries the language over to impermanence, keeping the etiquette of the exchange exactly.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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