Sa mo koso wa mine no arashi wa arakarame nabikishi eda o uramite zo koshi

English Translation

No doubt, no doubt, the
storm along the peak was fierce
and yet it was the
branch that bent before it that
I came away resenting

Meaning

No doubt the storm along the peak was fierce enough. And yet it was the branch that bent before it that I came away resenting.

Commentary

63 The Storm on the Peak

Minamoto no Muneyuki had been visiting a certain young woman, and her father, hearing of it, forbade it and would not let them meet, so that he came home with nothing. He composed this poem the next morning and sent it. 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 and thirty-ninth, and in the fifty-fourth his third son composes a poem. Of the young woman and her father the prose tells us nothing.
The setting is the morning after a journey that ended without a meeting.
What prompted the poem was being turned away by her father.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded.

The opening concedes the point: no doubt it was so.
The storm along the peak was fierce, he grants, and the storm is her father's prohibition. He allows that she had her difficulty.
What he calls the branch that bent is the girl who did as her father said. The wind cannot be helped; the branch is another matter.
The verb for resentment contains the word for looking at the underside of a leaf, so that a man staring up at a branch and a man nursing a grievance are the same figure. The poem narrows to a single point: not the storm, but what bent before it.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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