This word that men speak
pity in a world of change
this one word as well
upon what kind of person
is it a thing to bestow
- Meaning
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This word men speak—pity, in a world where nothing lasts—upon what sort of person is it a thing to bestow?
- Commentary
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Part Three: Takekawa
On the ninth of the Fourth Month the elder sister went to the Retired Emperor. Carriages and attendants came from the Minister of the Right and from others, and the preparations were as grand as for an entry into the palace itself. That day the Lieutenant wrote at length through Chujo no Omoto: that the life he had given up for lost was sad to him after all, and that if she would say only that she pitied him, he might be held back by it and live a little longer. When the letter was carried in, the two sisters were sitting together, low at the thought of parting. Perhaps because she was remembering what her father had intended for her, the elder took the letter up. She wondered what a man with both parents living had to be so extreme about, but seeing that he wrote of being at his end she half believed him, and wrote this at the edge of his own letter. She told the woman to copy it out and send it, but Chujo no Omoto sent the letter back as it was.
"Aware chou" takes up the "pity me" of his letter, and "a world where nothing lasts" takes up his "now I am at my end": she builds the poem out of his own words, one by one. To whom, she asks, is such a word properly addressed—feigning not to understand. She added that if he meant to speak of ill-omened things, she had learned a little of them herself, having lost her father: a way of telling a man with both parents alive that he was making too much of it. It is the only poem she ever sent him, and coming on the very day of her departure it left him weeping the harder.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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