Wasuraruru mi o ba omowazu chikaiteshi hito no inochi no oshiku mo aru kana

English Translation

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

Meaning

For myself, forgotten, I have no thought at all. But the life of the man who swore it before the gods — that I cannot help but mourn.

Commentary

84 The Life of One Who Swore

Ukon sent this poem when a man who had sworn by everything that he would not forget her did forget her. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
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. Of the man the prose tells us only that he had sworn everything.
Neither time nor place is given. All we are told is that a man who had sworn oaths forgot her.
What prompted the poem was his forgetting. It was sent to him.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. It was later included in the Shūi-shū and in the Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets.

The opening declares that she gives no thought to herself, the passive marking her as the one forgotten. She rules her own case out first.
The man is named as one who swore before the gods. An oath broken was believed to bring divine punishment, and that belief is what the phrase carries.
What follows is an exclamation over his life: it is his life she is sorry for, now that he has broken his word.
In place of her own grievance she puts concern for him. On the surface it is solicitude; because it invokes the gods' punishment, it is also a grievance. Wit and feeling coincide in it exactly, which is why it is among the best known poems in the book.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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