Haru no no wa haruke nagara mo wasuregusa ouru wa miyuru mono ni zo arikeru

English Translation

The fields of springtime
stretch far away, and even
so, the grass that makes
one forget can still be seen
growing plain enough to me

Meaning

The spring fields stretch far into the distance, and even so, the grass of forgetting can be seen growing there plainly enough.

Commentary

16 The Grass of Forgetting

The Lady Assistant Handmaid of the retired Emperor Yōzei sent "Haru no no wa haruke nagara mo wasuregusa ouru wa miyuru mono ni zo arikeru" to her stepfather, a Lesser Captain. His reply was "Haru no no ni oiji to zo omou wasuregusa tsuraki kokoro no tane shi nakereba". The section closes with the exchange.
An Assistant Handmaid was the second officer of the palace attendants' bureau. This one served the retired Emperor Yōzei. The Lesser Captain was her mother's second husband. The same Captain appears in the seventeenth section, exchanging poems with the Lady of Dewa, who served the late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial.
Neither time nor place is given, but the spring fields in the poem tell us the season.
The prose records nothing of what prompted it. All we are told is that the woman wrote first.
The Captain answered with a poem of his own, and the exchange closes the section. The seventeenth then gives an exchange between this same Captain and another woman after he has left her.

The grass of forgetting is the day lily, believed to make whoever wore it forget their cares. In poems of love it stands for the other person's forgetting.
The second line concedes the width of the fields and turns on it: broad as they are, even so.
The lower verse says that the grass can be seen growing there, with an emphatic particle governing the final verb, in the tone of something noticed.
On the surface she is only describing a field in spring. Underneath: somewhere in your heart the wish to forget me is growing, and I can see it. No word of accusation is used.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other