Kyō soe ni kurezarame ya wa to omoedomo taenu wa hito no kokoro narikeri

English Translation

Today too will come
in its own time to evening —
how should it not — and
still, what cannot wait so long
is the human heart, it seems

Meaning

Today too will come to evening in its own time — how should it not? And still, what cannot wait that long is the human heart.

Commentary

92 The Year Ends Today

When the late Provisional Middle Counsellor was courting the Minister of the Left's daughter, he composed "Mono omou to tsukihi no yuku mo shiranu ma ni kotoshi wa kyō ni hatenu to ka kiku" on the last day of the twelfth month of that year. He also composed "Ikani shite kaku omou chō koto o dani hitozute narade kimi ni kikasemu". Having written and written in this way, he at last spent a night with her, and on that morning composed "Kyō soe ni kurezarame ya wa to omoedomo taenu wa hito no kokoro narikeri". That is the whole of the section.
The Provisional Middle Counsellor held that office; he is the man visiting Ukon in the eighty-first and eighty-second sections, and appears again in the ninety-third. Of the Minister of the Left's daughter the prose says nothing further. The section follows the courtship from its beginning to the morning after, in three poems.
The setting is the morning after their night together.
What prompted the poem was that morning. It is a poem sent after a night.
The section closes with it. Three poems trace the course: the year's end, the want of any way to speak, and the morning after. It was later included in the Gosen-shū.

The opening question is rhetorical: will today not come to evening? It must; night will come again.
The concessive that follows separates what he knows from what he feels: knowing it makes no difference.
The closing marks the discovery that the heart cannot wait.
As in the fifth section, where the tears will not obey the heart, and the seventh, where the tears do not stop, a premise established by reasoning is undone by what the body or the heart does. It is the morning after a night finally won, and what it laments is the time until the next.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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