つつめども隠れぬものは夏虫の
身よりあまれる思ひなりけり
身よりあまれる思ひなりけり
- Roma-ji
-
Tsutsumedomo kakurenu mono wa natsumushi no mi yori amareru omoi narikeri
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Though I wrap it round, what will not stay hidden is the summer insect's fire — a longing that spills out beyond the body that holds it.
- Commentary
-
40 Fireflies
While the Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial was visiting the Katsura Princess, a young servant in his household was secretly in love with him, and he did not know it. On a night when fireflies were about, he told the servant to catch one; and the servant caught it in the sleeve of a girl's robe, wrapped it there, and composed this poem in the act of showing it to him. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Katsura Princess lived at Katsura and has poems in the twentieth and twenty-sixth sections. The Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial headed that ministry and appears through the seventeenth to twentieth sections. Of the servant the prose tells us only that this was a young person in his household.
The setting is a night of fireflies, in summer.
What prompted the poem was the prince's order to catch one. The servant wrapped it in a sleeve and sent the poem with it.
The section ends with the poem; no response from the prince is recorded. It was later included in the Gosen-shū.
The first word is the act itself: wrapping the firefly in a sleeve.
From there the poem turns to what wrapping cannot hide — starting from the plain fact that the light shows through the cloth.
The summer insect is the firefly, and the word for longing in the fourth line is also the word for fire. The light spilling from the insect's body and the feeling spilling from the servant's are held in that single word.
The final verb marks something realised. A love the prince has never noticed is confessed under cover of an errand, and on the surface the poem says nothing but that a firefly shines. Coming from a servant to a master, that reticence is the whole of its manner.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- In the villages they talk; up in the hills there is uproar; and I like white cloud, am I to be an empty, unmoored body