Ike wa nao mukashi nagara no kagami nite kage mishi kimi ga naki zo kanashiki

English Translation

The pond is a glass
still, just as it always was
and it is that you
who looked into it are gone
that makes the sorrow of it

Meaning

The pond is still a mirror, just as it always was; and it is that you who looked into it are gone that makes the sorrow of it.

Commentary

72 The Mirror as It Always Was

While that same Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial was alive, he had lived at the Teiji palace. Taira no Kanemori used to go there and, being summoned into his presence, would talk with him. After the prince's death Kanemori found that looking at the place moved him, and he composed this poem. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The prince appears in the seventy-first section, where his death is recorded. Taira no Kanemori is one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he exchanges poems with the Lady of Hyōe in the fifty-sixth section and with Taira no Nakaki's daughter in the fifty-seventh, and the fifty-eighth tells of his time in Michinoku. The Teiji palace was the residence of Emperor Uda after his abdication.
The setting is the Teiji palace, which Kanemori looks at after the prince's death.
What prompted the poem was seeing, after the prince was gone, the place where he had gone to talk with him in life.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded.

The opening says the pond is as it always was, the adverb carrying the sense of still, unchanged.
It is a mirror — an old way of speaking of the surface of water. The face that once looked into it is gone, and the water is exactly where it was.
The word for the reflected figure means a person's form, and by placing the seeing in the past the poem takes the absence for granted.
The closing, with an emphatic particle governing its adjective, sets what remains beside what is lost. Putting the unchanged thing first is what makes the absence tell.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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