Though the purple runs
the same in her blood and mine
the wisteria
would not for all of that fall
trailing as my heart would have

Meaning

Though the same purple runs in her blood and mine, the wisteria would not fall trailing as my heart would have had it.

Commentary

Part Three: Takekawa

　The Fujiwara Chamberlain answered him with this. He was his mother's third son and the elder sister's full brother, and he was unhappy that she had gone to an aging Retired Emperor; his poem hints that the matter had never been in his hands. Being an honest young man, he was sorry for Kaoru too. From here the tale turns to the Chamberlain Lieutenant's torment and to the changes around the elder sister.

　"Murasaki" is the purple that stands for kinship, and since wisteria is purple the color itself carries the fact that they are brother and sister. "Kakaru" is both the flower trailing from a branch and a thing hanging upon one's heart, that is, going as one wishes. The blood may run the same, he says, but his sister's fate was never his to arrange, so that he both sympathizes with Kaoru and admits his own regret. The two wisteria poems of this chapter gather the young men's disappointment into a single picture of pine and flower.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

Though the purple runs the same in her blood and mine the wisteria would not for all of that fall trailing as my heart would have

Though the purple runs
the same in her blood and mine
the wisteria
would not for all of that fall
trailing as my heart would have