おく露のほどをも待たぬ朝顔は
見ずぞなかなかあるべかりける
見ずぞなかなかあるべかりける
- Roma-ji
-
Oku tsuyu no hodo o mo matanu asagao wa mizu zo nakanaka arubekarikeru
- English Translation
-
The morning glory
that will not wait even for
the dew to settle
it would have been better not
to have seen it at all, then
- Meaning
- The morning glory will not wait even the time it takes for dew to settle. Better, then, not to have seen it at all.
- Commentary
-
39 The Morning Glory
When the daughter of Minamoto no Morochika, Governor of Ise, was married to Minamoto no Tadaakira, Minamoto no Muneyuki called over a young girl who served in that house, spent the night talking with her, and sent this poem the next morning. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Minamoto no Muneyuki was a grandson of Emperor Kōkō and one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he appears in the thirtieth through thirty-second sections and in the thirty-fourth. Minamoto no Morochika headed the administration of Ise province, and Tadaakira became his son-in-law. Of the girl the prose tells us only that she served in the house.
The setting is the house where the marriage took place, on the morning after a night spent talking.
What prompted the poem was the ending of that night. It was sent to the girl.
The section ends with the poem; no reply from her is recorded. It was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.
The first line names the brief interval in which dew settles — dew that comes in the night and is gone by morning, the shortest span there is.
A morning glory that will not wait even that long is a flower that opens at dawn and is shut by noon, the standing figure for what does not last. A meeting of a single night lies directly over it.
The closing says it would have been better not to have seen it, with an adverb meaning that half-measures are worse than nothing, and an emphatic particle governing the final verb.
Not to have seen it would have spared him the loss: that is how he states the regret of a night that ends. It has the form of a morning-after poem, and says nothing about meeting again.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- There are flowers that have come into bloom like this and yet, for my part am I to call this season the same spring that they are in
- If by rare chance some- one should come asking for me tell them this: that she hoisted her grief like a sail and went out on the wide sea
- Though I wrap it round what will not stay hidden is the summer insect's fire, the longing that spills out beyond the body's compass
- Even as we talk the world is a fleeting thing so how am I to show you what I feel — how make this shared tenderness be seen