Aoyagi no ito uchihaete nodokanaru haruhi shimo koso omoiidekere

English Translation

The green willow trails
its long threads out unhurried
and it is on such
a calm, long spring day like this
that I remember you well

Meaning

The willow lets down its long green threads, and it is on a quiet spring day like this one that you come into my mind.

Commentary

3 A Thousand Colours

When the late Major Counsellor Minamoto still held the rank of Consultant, the Kyōgoku Lady of the Bedchamber, who was to preside over a celebration for the Teiji retired emperor, sent word to him that she meant to hold such an occasion and asked him to have a branch or two of offerings made up. He had a great number of open-work bamboo baskets made and gave them to Toshiko to dye in various colours. The woven mats too, and all the dyeing, twisting and plaiting, he left entirely in her hands. Everything was finished in haste by the end of the ninth month. Then, on the first day of the tenth month, Toshiko sent "Chiji no iro ni isogishi aki wa suginikeri ima wa shigure ni nani o somemashi" to the man who had kept her working at such speed. While the work was being rushed through, messages had passed between them without a break; afterwards, the business being done, nothing came, and when the end of the twelfth month arrived she sent "Katakake no fune ni ya noreru shiranami no sawagu toki nomi omoiizuru kimi". That too went unanswered, and the year turned. Around the second month he broke off a willow branch from his grounds, one unusually long and supple, and sent it with "Aoyagi no ito uchihaete nodokanaru haruhi shimo koso omoiidekere". Toshiko praised it beyond measure and went on telling the story for years afterwards.
The late Major Counsellor Minamoto is Minamoto no Kiyokage, a son of Emperor Yōzei, who served as Consultant before rising to Major Counsellor; the title used in this section is the Chinese-style name for that earlier post. The Kyōgoku Lady of the Bedchamber was a daughter of the Minister of the Left, Fujiwara no Tokihira, and became a consort of Emperor Uda. Toshiko was the wife of Fujiwara no Chikane, a third-rank officer of the Right Horse Bureau and a son of Fujiwara no Tadafusa. She appears repeatedly in this book as a poet.
The setting is the second month of the new year, at the Major Counsellor's residence. A willow there, with one branch unusually long and supple, provides the occasion.
What prompted the poem was that he had let the year turn without answering either "Chiji no iro ni isogishi aki wa suginikeri ima wa shigure ni nani o somemashi" or "Katakake no fune ni ya noreru shiranami no sawagu toki nomi omoiizuru kimi", the two she had sent him. The poem went attached to the branch he broke off.
Toshiko praised it beyond measure and went on telling the whole story, poem and circumstances together, for years afterwards. The section closes on that sentence.

The willow's fine hanging branches are taken as threads, and the word for their long unhurried stretching carries straight over into the long quiet spring day that follows.
The emphatic particle in the fourth line insists on it: on a day like this and no other. It governs the verb that ends the poem, so that the insistence is built into the grammar as well as the sense.
It is not in a busy autumn but on an idle spring afternoon that she comes to mind, which answers her complaint about the breaking waves exactly.
The branch he broke off is itself the subject of the poem, so that gift and verse work as one thing; the exchange over pampas grass in the seventeenth section is built the same way. What Toshiko praised, given that two of her poems had gone unanswered, was presumably the deftness of the reply.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other