おもふ人雨と降りくるものならば
わがもる床はかへさざらまし
わがもる床はかへさざらまし
- Roma-ji
-
Omou hito ame to furikuru mono naraba waga moru toko wa kaesazaramashi
- English Translation
-
If the one I love
came down to me as the rain
comes down, then this bed
of mine, this leaking bed, I
would not be turning over
- Meaning
- If the one I love came down to me the way this rain comes down, I would not be turning over the leaking bed I keep.
- Commentary
-
83 The Bed I Keep
While Ukon was serving at the palace and living in a room there, a man used to come to her in secret. He was Head Chamberlain, and so attended constantly in the emperor's presence. One rainy night he stopped outside the lattice of her room without her knowing, and she, because the rain was coming through, set about turning over the matting and murmured this poem. He was moved by it and went in to her. The section closes on that sentence.
Ukon was a daughter of the Lesser Captain Suenawa and is known as a poet. She appears in five consecutive sections, the eighty-first through eighty-fifth; the poem of the eighty-fourth was taken into the Shūi-shū and into the Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets. The man was Head Chamberlain, an office close to the emperor's person; the prose notes that he was constantly in attendance.
The setting is a rainy night in her room at the palace, with the man outside the lattice, unknown to her.
What prompted the poem was her turning over the wet matting. It was not sent to anyone; it was murmured aloud.
Hearing it, he was moved and came in. A poem spoken to no one is what moves the scene.
The opening supposes the beloved coming down like rain, in the grammar of what is not the case.
The verb she uses of the bed means both to leak and to keep or guard, so that a bed the rain comes through and a bed kept for a lover stand together.
What she says she would not do is turn it over: there was a belief that turning or moving the bedding drove a lover away, and the plain necessity of a leaking roof becomes the obstacle to a love affair.
The poem is addressed to no one; it is what she says to herself while working. That the man outside the lattice heard it and came in means that words meant for nobody did the most.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- The one who told me he would not forget, and made me hope — he is well I hear. Then those words he spoke where in the world have they gone
- More warily than the pheasant that takes wing at dawn from Kurikoma means to keep clear of the hunt I meant to keep clear of this
- For myself, forgot- ten, I have no thought at all But the life of one who swore it on the gods — that I find I cannot but mourn
- Then think of me — think An empty shell the diving women will not pick up: should you let a name stand that has nothing at all in it