Do you too weep with
the muffled voice, if your heart
runs together with
that bird of the road of death,
whose cry is of no avail

Meaning

Do you too weep in a muffled voice, if your heart runs with that bird of the road of death, whose crying is of no avail?

Commentary

Part Three: Kagero

　At the end of the Third Month Ukifune vanished from the villa at Uji. Her gentlewomen guessed she had drowned herself, kept the truth back, carried the clothes she had left off out to a carriage, and held a funeral in form only. Kaoru, who was at Ishiyama, heard the news and blamed himself; Niou took to his bed, giving out that he was ill. With the new month came the tenth of the Fourth, the day he was to have brought her to the capital. In the evening, smelling the orange in the garden and hearing a cuckoo cry twice as it passed, Kaoru had a branch broken off and sent it to Niou, who was then with Naka no Kimi.

　Shinobine is the first low call of the cuckoo, and carries weeping where no one can see. Shide no taosa is another name for the cuckoo, the bird held to come over the mountain of death, and so a messenger of the dead. Orange and cuckoo have gone together in poetry from far back, and the scent of orange as a thing that brings the past to mind is behind the poem as well. On its face it is a note of condolence; the question whether the other man is weeping too says, without saying it, that Kaoru knows what lay between Niou and Ukifune.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

Do you too weep with the muffled voice, if your heart runs together with that bird of the road of death, whose cry is of no avail

Do you too weep with
the muffled voice, if your heart
runs together with
that bird of the road of death,
whose cry is of no avail