桜こそ思ひ知らすれ咲き匂ふ
花も紅葉も常ならぬ世を
花も紅葉も常ならぬ世を
- Roma-ji
-
Sakura koso omoi shirasure sakiniou
hana mo momiji mo tsune naranu yo o - English Translation
-
It is the cherry
that brings it home to us all:
blossom at its best
and crimson leaf alike belong
to a world that does not stay
- Meaning
- It is the cherry that brings it home: blossom at its best and crimson leaf alike belong to a world that does not stay.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Agemaki
The second of the five poems of the outing, spoken by Kaoru. Picking up the cherry of spring from the poem before, he answers that the cherry is precisely what teaches impermanence. Having lost the Eighth Prince, and with nothing settled between himself and Oigimi, he colours even a party with his own cast of mind.
Omoi shirasu is to bring a thing home to someone. The cherry, which blooms and at once falls, has always served as the figure for what does not last. Setting blossom and crimson leaf side by side, he says that all the beauty of spring and autumn passes. That a piece of party verse becomes, in his mouth, a statement of Buddhist doctrine is characteristic of him.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- Am I to go on waiting out the far reaches of the Uji bridge, with nothing to trust in but your word that it will not break
- Even the foot of the tree I saw once, that time, when the flowers were at their height—even that place is desolate in autumn
- By what way, I wonder, did the autumn take itself off and go from us, when the shade of the crimson leaves is so hard to pass by
- On the wall of rock of a hill village where he I knew is no more, how long and constant of heart the creeping vine has spread out