かりそめに君がふし見し常夏の
ねもかれにしをいかで咲きけむ
ねもかれにしをいかで咲きけむ
- Roma-ji
-
Karisome ni kimi ga fushi mishi tokonatsu no ne mo karenishi o ikade sakikemu
- English Translation
-
The pink you lay be-
side and looked at for a while
its root has withered
and our lying has gone too
How was it flowering then
- Meaning
- The pink you lay beside and looked at for a while — its root has withered, and our lying together with it. How was it flowering, then?
- Commentary
-
108 The Pink That Was Their Bed
The woman known as the Present Lady of the Nan'in house was a daughter of Minamoto no Muneyuki, Master of the Right Capital Office, and served the Lady Superintendent of the Palace Attendants, a daughter of the Chancellor. A man of the Palace Guards, then known as Lord Aya, used often to come to her room, and when he stopped coming she composed this poem on the withering of the pinks. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Minamoto no Muneyuki was a grandson of Emperor Kōkō and one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he appears in the thirtieth through thirty-second sections, and in the thirty-fourth, thirty-ninth, sixty-third and eightieth. The poet is his daughter, who appears in the hundred and ninth and hundred and tenth sections as well.
The setting is her room at the Nan'in house, in the season when the pinks wither.
What prompted the poem was the ending of his visits and the withering of the flowers.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded. Where the thirtieth through thirty-fourth sections centre on Muneyuki, this one and the two that follow give three consecutive sections to his daughter.
The first word means for a short time only: she concedes the lightness of it herself.
The word for his lying down is also the word for a joint in a stem, so that a man stretched out beside the flower and the plant's own joint stand together. The pink's name contains the word for a bed, and so suggests lying together.
The word for the root in the fourth line is also the word for sleeping, and the verb for withering is also the verb for parting, so that a root drying up and a bed abandoned are one word.
The closing asks, in the past tense, how it can have been in flower. If the root is dead the blossom makes no sense — which is her way of saying that the visits have ended and the feeling has not.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- It is because I have gone on weeping that my voice reached the cloud-country at all — and still there is on- ly this sense of growing distance
- Now that meeting you has come to be a thing I only pray for, I find myself longing for those days when I sent you home un-
- Did it find it hard that I once rode on it, and fade away for that — that life of a drop of dew that hangs upon a grass blade
- The wide sky is not clouded over — and yet, in the godless month, as the years go by and the rains fall, my sleeves are wet through still