Nushi mo naki yado ni kuretaru matsu mireba chiyo suginikeru kokochi koso sure

English Translation

In this dwelling place
that has no master, I see
the pine standing dead
and it is as though a thou-
sand years had gone by since then

Meaning

When I see the pine standing dead in this dwelling that has lost its master, it feels as though a thousand years had passed.

Commentary

25 A Thousand Years of Pine

While the priest Myōkaku was shut away at Mount Hiei at his devotions, he saw a pine standing dead outside the cell of an eminent priest who had died, and composed this poem. When he did, the disciples lodging in the cell were moved by it. This Myōkaku was Toshiko's elder brother.
Myōkaku was a priest practising on Mount Hiei. The prose ends by giving his connection: he was Toshiko's brother. Toshiko was the wife of Fujiwara no Chikane, entrusted with the preparations for the retired emperor's celebration in the third section, composing a poem of condolence in the ninth, and dying in the thirteenth.
The setting is the cell on Mount Hiei of an eminent priest who had died, with a dead pine standing at it.
What prompted the poem was the sight of that pine. The place — a cell whose master is gone — is what produced it.
The disciples who heard it were moved, the prose says. The section closes on that sentence and on the note about Myōkaku's sister.

The first line sets down the cell that has lost its master; the word means simply a dwelling, here a priest's quarters.
What stands dead in it is a pine. Pines were held to live a thousand years and were the standing figure for long life, so that a dead one makes the poem's whole point.
The third line says that a thousand years have gone by. If a pine's span is a thousand years, then a thousand must have passed for this one to die — and yet the master has not been dead long at all.
The final phrase, with an emphatic particle governing its verb, presses the feeling home: this is how it feels. The gap between how little time has actually passed and how long it seems is what the closing holds.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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