Wringing out the white
sleeves of my robe, white as the
breaking waves—for you
I cannot even rise up
and stand to dance as I should
- Meaning
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Wringing the white sleeves of my robe, white as the breaking waves—it is for your sake that I cannot even rise and dance.
- Commentary
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Volume Four: The Return
Afterward a number of people gathered before the Retired Emperor and there was joking among them. He remarked, laughing, that the shrine maiden in the white silk had set her heart on Lord Kunitsuna. The Fifth Avenue Major Counselor Kunitsuna denied it strenuously.
Just then a serving woman came in with a letter and presented it, saying it was for the Fifth Avenue Major Counselor. There, you see, the company said, and made much of it. The Major Counselor took it and opened it, and found this poem.
The Retired Emperor said it was gracefully done and that an answer must be made, and had an inkstone brought out at once.
Shiranami means the breaking waves and also the white silk the shrine maiden wears. The sleeves are wrung because of tears, and the single color joins wave, robe, and weeping.
Tachi carries both tatsu, "to cut cloth," which belongs to robes, and tatsu, "to rise." A shrine maiden's office is to dance before the god; to say she cannot rise and dance is to say she cannot perform her duty. She states a lover's grief in the vocabulary of her own vocation—one who serves a god declaring that on a mortal's account she cannot stand up for the rite. As a confession it goes a long way.
She is being laughed at by name in a company where she is not present, and into that company her own letter arrives. A love on the point of being consumed as gossip changes the air of the room by way of a single poem.
shiranami……white breakers; also the white robe.
shiboru……to wring out a sleeve wet with tears.
kimi yue ni……for your sake.
tachi……a pun on "to cut cloth" and "to rise."
mawarene……cannot dance.
naishi……a woman who serves a shrine and dances before its deity.
Gojō no Dainagon……Fujiwara no Kunitsuna, treated at length in Volume Six.
binjo……a serving woman.
- Source
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Heike Monogatari
- Other
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