よそながら思ひしよりも夏の夜の
見はてぬ夢ぞはかなかりける
見はてぬ夢ぞはかなかりける
- Roma-ji
-
Yoso nagara omoishi yori mo natsu no yo no mihatenu yume zo hakanakarikeru
- English Translation
-
More than when I thought
of such things as another's
affair, it is the
summer night's dream, never seen
through to its end, that is frail
- Meaning
- More than when I thought of it as something happening to other people, it is the summer night's dream, never seen through to the end, that turns out to be the frail thing.
- Commentary
-
31 A Dream Not Seen Through
The same Master of the Right Capital Office sent this poem to the Lady of the Palace Guards. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The late Master of the Right Capital Office is Minamoto no Muneyuki, a grandson of Emperor Kōkō and one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; the office he held was head of the administration of the western half of the capital. In the thirtieth section he composes on seaweed sent up from Kii. The Lady of the Palace Guards appears repeatedly in this book, exchanging poems with the Prince of the Ministry of Central Affairs in the eighth section and with the Lesser Captain in the twenty-first and twenty-second.
Neither time nor place is given. The summer night in the poem tells us the season.
The prose records nothing of what prompted it. All we are told is that he sent it to her.
The section ends with the poem; no reply from her is recorded. The poem was later included in the Gosen-shū.
The first word means: as someone else's business, as a thing with no bearing on oneself. It sets up the days when he watched other people's affairs from outside.
The second line makes the comparison that carries into the lower verse: frailer than he had supposed from that distance.
A summer night is short, so the dream ends before it is finished — brevity and abruptness stated as one thing.
The final verb, governed by an emphatic particle, has the tone of a discovery: so that is how it is. In the order of the sections this stands between the poem of the thirtieth, lamenting a promotion withheld, and those of the thirty-second, petitioning for one; read as a love poem, it also sounds as the complaint of a man whose hopes have not been met.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- Wind off the open sea, and in Fukei's bay the waves rise; and I am I to be sunk by e- ven the last swell they leave behind
- That there might be one to call me dear — I should have been born, if nothing better, at least as the grass that grows on Musashi plain
- Under the branches in a hill village where the cold rains only fall is it the one standing there that lets the wet through and past