Ominaeshi oru te ni kakaru shiratsuyu wa mukashi no kyō ni aranu namida ka

English Translation

The white dew that falls
upon the hand that breaks off
the maidenflower
can it be tears — that today
is not the today of old

Meaning

The white dew that catches on the hand breaking off the maidenflower — can it be tears, that this day is not the day it used to be?

Commentary

29 The Maidenflower

At the house of the late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial, the Minister of the Right of Sanjō and other high nobles had gathered, playing go and making music; and when the night grew late they were all drunk and talking together and giving out gifts. The Minister of the Right, who had put a maidenflower in his hair, then composed this poem. There were many poems by the others too, the prose says, but the poor ones have been forgotten.
The Minister of the Right of Sanjō is Fujiwara no Sadakata, who rose to that office and took his name from his residence at Sanjō; the Fujiwara no Asatada of the sixth section was his son. The late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial headed that ministry and appears through the seventeenth to twentieth sections. Here the setting is his house after his death.
The setting is that house, at a late-night gathering of high nobles. The maidenflowers in bloom tell us it is autumn.
What prompted the poem was the Minister's breaking off a maidenflower and putting it in his hair. The dew that caught on his hand is the substance of the poem.
The section ends with it. The prose records that the other poems have been forgotten, judging them by whether anyone bothered to remember. This poem was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.

The maidenflower is one of the seven plants of autumn, a slender stem topped with small yellow blossoms. Its name contains the word for woman, and it had long been treated in poetry as a flower suggesting a woman.
The dew that catches on the hand that breaks it off is simply what has just happened, set down in the opening lines.
The closing asks whether it can be tears — tears that this day is no longer the day it once was. The day of old is the same date in a year when the prince was still alive.
Seeing dew as tears is an old move, but here it is not his own tears; it is the dew on the flower that he reads that way. Composed as an entertainment at a party, the poem turns into an elegy, and slips grief into a room of drunken talk.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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