秋風になびく尾花は昔見し
たもとに似てぞ恋しかりける
たもとに似てぞ恋しかりける
- Roma-ji
-
Akikaze ni nabiku obana wa mukashi mishi tamoto ni nite zo koishikarikeru
- English Translation
-
The plumes of pampas
bending in the autumn wind
are so like the sleeve
I saw in those days long past
that longing has come on me
- Meaning
- The pampas plumes bending in the autumn wind are so like the sleeve I saw in those days that I find myself longing for you.
- Commentary
-
17 Pampas Plumes in the Wind
The Lesser Captain, stepfather to the Lady of Dewa, had been visiting her while she served the late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial, but in time he stopped coming. Afterwards she tied a letter to a stem of pampas grass and sent it to him; he answered with "Akikaze ni nabiku obana wa mukashi mishi tamoto ni nite zo koishikarikeru", and her reply was "Tamoto to mo shinobazaramashi akikaze ni nabiku obana no odorokasazu wa". The section closes with the exchange.
The late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial headed that ministry and appears again in the eighteenth through twentieth sections. The Lady of Dewa was a woman in his service, named for that province. The Lesser Captain is the man of the sixteenth section, where he exchanges poems with the Assistant Handmaid of the retired Emperor Yōzei.
The setting is autumn, after the two had parted. Pampas plumes are a mark of that season.
What prompted the poem was her sending him a letter tied to a stem of pampas grass. She wrote first, but the prose does not give the contents of her letter, and the section begins from his answer.
She answered with a poem of her own, and the exchange closes the section. The same Captain who in the sixteenth section assured his stepdaughter that no grass of forgetting grew in him is here telling another woman that he longs for her, so that the order of the sections shows up his inconstancy.
The plumes are the flowering heads of pampas grass, whose swaying in the wind was long compared to a person waving a sleeve.
Here he takes up the very stem she has sent him and says that its moving head is like a sleeve he once saw. Making the gift itself the subject of the poem is the same device as the willow branch in the third section.
By placing the sight in the past he takes their separation for granted, and an emphatic particle ties the likeness to the longing: it is because it resembles her that he longs.
He says he longs for her without saying he will return — and it is exactly that evasion her reply will seize on.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- In the spring meadow no such grass will grow, I think the forgetting grass for there is no seed in me of any coldness of heart
- You would not have thought of any sleeve, nor of me had the pampas plumes bending in the autumn wind not startled you into it
- Even the grasses of this house you have let run to waste and ruin these I picked before all else thinking they were for your sake