色ぞとは思ほえずともこの花は
時につけつつ思ひ出でなむ
時につけつつ思ひ出でなむ
- Roma-ji
-
Iro zo to wa omooezu tomo kono hana wa toki ni tsuketsutsu omoiidenamu
- English Translation
-
Though you may not think
its colour anything much
still, this flower — I
would have you look on it and
remember, from time to time
- Meaning
- Even if you do not think much of its colour, I would have you look on this flower from time to time, and remember me.
- Commentary
-
34 This Flower
A woman sent this poem to the Master of the Right Capital Office. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Master of the Right Capital Office is Minamoto no Muneyuki, a grandson of Emperor Kōkō and one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he appears through the thirtieth to thirty-second sections, and in the thirty-first sends a poem to the Lady of the Palace Guards. Of the woman the prose tells us nothing.
Neither time nor place is given. The flower in the poem, and the sense that it was sent with one, tell us it is a season of flowers.
The prose records nothing of what prompted it. All we are told is that she sent it to him.
The section ends with the poem; no reply from him is recorded.
The first line concedes that he may think little of its colour, and its concessive grammar carries on regardless. She begins by disparaging her own gift.
The third line puts the flower at the centre; that she sent one with the poem is known from this word alone.
The fourth line means: from time to time, as the occasions come, with a grammar of repetition — not once, but again and again.
The closing verb is a wish directed at another: that he would remember. She holds out not herself but a flower, and asks that seeing it should bring her to mind. Gift and poem working as one thing is the arrangement of the willow branch in the third section and the pampas grass in the seventeenth.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- This body of ivy with no tree at whose foot it might lean and take hold stays green the whole year, and so the autumn is sorrowful
- Since it is a peak where the white clouds rise and stand in nine folds on folds it is for that, I see now that they call it Ōuchi
- Hearing it is called the capital of many reigns, like bamboo joints I have no doubt at all that a thousand years are yours here