Yukite minu hito no tame ni to omowazu wa tare ka oramashi waga yado no kiku

English Translation

Had I not thought of
you, who cannot come and see
them for yourself — then
who would have broken them off
these chrysanthemums of mine

Meaning

If I had not thought of you, who cannot come and see them, who would have broken off these chrysanthemums of mine?

Commentary

49 The Chrysanthemums of My House

The same emperor sent chrysanthemums to his daughter, then serving as High Priestess of Kamo, with the poem "Yukite minu hito no tame ni to omowazu wa tare ka oramashi waga yado no kiku". Her reply was "Waga yado ni iro oritomuru kimi naku wa yoso ni mo kiku no hana o mimashi ya". That is the whole of the section.
The High Priestess of Kamo was an unmarried imperial princess serving at that shrine, an office distinct from the High Priestess of Ise. Here the emperor's own daughter held it. The emperor is the one of the forty-eighth section.
The setting is the emperor's residence. The chrysanthemums in bloom tell us it is autumn.
What prompted the poem was the sending of those flowers to his daughter at Kamo. It went with them.
She answered with a poem of her own, and the exchange closes the section. This poem was later included in the Shokukokin-shū.

The one who cannot come and see them is his daughter: a High Priestess at Kamo could not come and go at the palace as she pleased, and her position is held in that phrase.
The third line sets up a condition contrary to fact: had he not thought of her.
The question that follows is rhetorical — who would break them off? No one. He would not have picked them for anyone else.
The closing marks the flowers as his own house's. Chrysanthemums blooming at the palace, sent to a daughter who cannot come there, are the whole of the poem. Gift and verse 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

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