Could I have thought it—
that I should come to live here
deep among the hills
and look on the palace moon
only from far outside it
- Meaning
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Could I have thought that I should live deep in the mountains and look on the moon of the palace only from far outside?
- Commentary
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The Initiates' Chapter: The Progress to Ōhara
As the party neared the hut, a nun in a dyed robe was seen coming down from the hill behind, gathering brushwood and bracken. Spoken to, the old woman said she was the daughter of the late Shinzei, called Awa-no-naishi. Her mother was the Kii Nii; she had once been treated with great kindness, she said, and there was no helping what the years had done. She wept quietly as she spoke. The cloistered emperor said that he had entirely failed to recognize her, and that it seemed a dream. His attendants, who had thought her a strangely imperious nun, were astonished in their turn.
She led them into the hut. Opening the sliding door, they found in one room an image of the welcoming triad, the central figure holding a cord of five colors; on the left a painting of Fugen, on the right paintings of Shandao and of the late emperor, and the eight scrolls of the Lotus Sutra with Shandao's own writings beside them. A woman who had passed her days in rooms full of rare incense now sat in the smell of a poor one.
On the sliding door, passages of scripture written on colored paper had been pasted here and there. A line of the monk Ōe no Sadamoto was among them. And there, apparently in the empress's own hand, stood this poem.
Omoiki ya is the exclamation: did I ever think it? I never did.
The opening is word for word that of the poem Fujiwara no Tashi composed in Volume One, when she was made consort to two reigns—and the lower verse agrees as well, down to "the moon of the palace, that I should see it." Tashi wrote that she never thought she would be brought back and see that same moon. The empress writes that she never thought she would see it from far outside.
The same poem stands near the beginning of the tale and near its end. One is a woman dragged back to the palace; the other a woman gone as far from it as she could go. They look up at the same phrase, kumoi no tsuki, from opposite positions.
Whether the correspondence was intended cannot be known. But for a reader who remembers Volume One, this verse sounds twice.
It was written on a sliding door. Giō's door, a pillar in an emptied cell, a pillar of a worship hall, a pillar of the palace, a pillar of a hermitage—the Tale of the Heike returns again and again to poems left on buildings, and this one belongs to that line.
omoiki ya……did I ever think it? I did not.
miyama……deep mountains.
sumai shite……making one's dwelling.
kumoi……the sky; also the palace.
yoso ni……from outside, at a distance.
min to wa……that I should come to see it.
raigō no sanzon……Amida with Kannon and Seishi.
goshiki no ito……the five-colored cord held at the hour of death.
Awa-no-naishi……a daughter of the lay monk Shinzei.
ranja……orchid and musk; a costly fragrance.
- Source
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Heike Monogatari
- Other
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