Ki no kuni no Muro no kōri ni yuku hito wa kaze no samusa mo omoishirareji

English Translation

One who is going
down to the district of Muro
in the land of Ki
will hardly come to know what
the cold of the wind can be

Meaning

One going down to the district of Muro in Kii will hardly come to know what a cold wind is.

Commentary

88 The District of Muro

The same man, going down to Kii, sent for clothing, saying that he was cold; and the woman composed "Ki no kuni no Muro no kōri ni yuku hito wa kaze no samusa mo omoishirareji". His reply was "Ki no kuni no Muro no kōri ni yukinagara kimi to fusuma no naki zo wabishiki". That is the whole of the section.
The man is the one of the eighty-seventh section, who left the woman in Tajima and went up to the capital, exchanging poems about the snow. Kii is what is now Wakayama prefecture, and Muro was a district within it.
The setting is the eve of his journey down to Kii.
What prompted the poem was his sending for clothing on the grounds that he was cold. It is her reply.
He answered with a poem of his own, and the exchange closes the section.

Muro was a district in Kii, and the sound of its name is also the word for a closed, warm chamber, so that warmth is written into the place.
The word for district carries the sound of the word for ice, so that warmth and cold sit together inside a single place name.
The third line names the one going: the man on his way down.
The closing says he will hardly come to know it, in the grammar of what will not be. A man bound for somewhere as warm as a heated room has no business sending for winter clothes — that is the point of it. Working from the sound of a place name, she turns his request aside lightly.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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