Aku to ieba shizugokoro naki haru no yo no yume to ya kimi o yoru nomi wa mimu

English Translation

They say dawn has come
and my heart cannot be still
a short spring night's dream
is that all you are to me
something seen at night alone

Meaning

Word comes that it is growing light, and my heart will not settle. Are you to be no more than a spring night's dream to me, a thing seen only after dark?

Commentary

12 A Dream of the Spring Night

The same lord was to take that princess as his wife, and the emperor himself arranged the match. But before the marriage was made, in the earliest days of it, he went to her night after night in secret. This poem was composed as he was leaving for home. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The same lord is Minamoto no Kiyokage of the eleventh section. The princess is the young lady of the Teiji palace towards whom his affections had turned there. Of the emperor who arranged the match the prose gives nothing but the title.
The setting is the early morning, in the period of secret visits before the marriage was formalised, at the point where word comes that it is growing light.
What prompted the poem is that moment of departure: the meeting over and the night ending.
The section closes with the poem; no reply from the princess is recorded. The arrangement of the sections is pointed — the man who drifted away from the Lady of the East Wing is now, at a new door, complaining that the nights are short. The poem was later included in the Shinkokin-shū.

The poem opens with the word for daybreak, and the mere news that it is coming is enough to unsettle him; the phrase that follows names that unsettled state.
From there it moves to the dream of a spring night, a stock figure for what is brief and insubstantial, and lays it over the meeting itself.
The question in the fourth line asks whether that is all she is to be to him. The particle of limitation in the last line carries the strain of not being able to meet her openly by day.
The whole turns on making the word dream do two jobs at once: brevity, and a kind of unreliability.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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