Yoiyoi ni koishisa masaru karigoromo kokorozukushi no mono ni zo arikeru

English Translation

Night upon night the
longing in me grows — this robe
for the hunt turns out
to be a thing that spends the
whole of a man's heart on it

Meaning

Night after night the longing grows in me. This hunting robe turns out to be a thing that spends a man's whole heart.

Commentary

69 The Hunting Robe

When Fujiwara no Tadafumi was appointed commander of the expedition against the eastern barbarians and set out for Michinoku, his son and the Lady of the Palace Guards were secretly in love. She gave him, as parting gifts for the journey east, a hunting robe of dyed cloth, an under-robe, and offerings for the gods; and he sent her this poem. She was moved by it and wept.
Fujiwara no Tadafumi was appointed commander of the expedition; the poet is his son. The Lady of the Palace Guards appears repeatedly in this book: with the Prince of the Ministry of Central Affairs in the eighth section, before her old house in the tenth, and with the Lesser Captain in the twenty-first and twenty-second.
The setting is the eve of the departure east, with the parting gifts given.
What prompted the poem was receiving them. It was sent to her.
She was moved by it and wept. The section closes on that sentence. The seventieth tells what came of the journey.

The first line means night after night, the word doubled to mark the repetition.
The longing grows with the hunting robe: each time he puts it on, the giver comes to mind.
The phrase in the fourth line means spending one's heart entirely — both the care she put into making it and the toll it takes on him who wears it.
The closing, with an emphatic particle governing its verb, has the tone of a discovery. It is a poem of thanks for a parting gift, and what it says is that the gift makes leaving harder. That is presumably why she wept.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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