わが宿に色をりとむる君なくは
よそにもきくの花を見ましや
よそにもきくの花を見ましや
- Roma-ji
-
Waga yado ni iro oritomuru kimi naku wa yoso ni mo kiku no hana o mimashi ya
- English Translation
-
Were it not for you
who break the colour off and
send it to my house
would I have seen them at all —
heard of them, even, far off
- Meaning
- Were it not for you, who break off the colour and send it to my house, would I have seen these flowers at all — or even heard of them, so far away?
- 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 High Priestess's residence, at the moment the flowers arrived.
What prompted the poem is the emperor's, "Yukite minu hito no tame ni to omowazu wa tare ka oramashi waga yado no kiku", together with the chrysanthemums it came with.
This reply closes the forty-ninth section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the exchange alone.
The opening speaks of breaking off the colour and keeping it for her: the colour is the flowers, and the phrase means his sending them.
The third line sets a condition — were it not for you — matching the conditional with which his poem began.
The word for chrysanthemum in the fourth line is also the word for hearing, so that without him she could not so much as hear of them at a distance.
The closing question is rhetorical: could she have seen them? She could not. He closed with a rhetorical question and so does she. The reply matches his poem's shape throughout, and thanks him without using any word of thanks.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- Are you the light of the spring sun crossing the wide sky, that you should stay always away, somewhere else unhurried, taking your ease
- 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
- Not cloud — the thing that sits on this peak among the high trees turns out to be myself, who have turned my back on a world of hardship
- An autumn that lays its frost on one branch and not another — and so even the light of the sun comes to seem hard to bear now