Waga norishi koto o ushi to ya kienikemu kusa ni kakareru tsuyu no inochi wa

English Translation

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

Meaning

Did it find it hard that I once rode on it, and fade away for that — a life like a drop of dew hanging on a blade of grass?

Commentary

109 Did It Fade for Sorrow

The same daughter of Minamoto no Muneyuki wished to borrow again an ox she had once borrowed from Minamoto no Ōoki, and was told that the ox she had had was dead; and this poem was her answer. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
She appears in the hundred and eighth section with the poem about the pinks. Minamoto no Ōoki was the man who had lent the ox.
Neither time nor place is given. All we are told is that she asked to borrow the ox again and learned that it had died.
What prompted the poem was that news. It is her reply.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. It was later included in the Gosen-shū.

The word for finding something hard to bear is also the word for an ox, so that the animal itself is written into the question of whether it took her riding badly.
What follows supposes, in the past tense, that it faded away; the verb is the polite word for dying and belongs with dew.
A life like dew on a blade of grass brings in the grass an ox feeds on, and the dew with it.
The poem ends on that dew-life, named and left standing. Told that an ox has died, she writes without reproach and without lament, building the whole on one pun and on the association of grass and dew. As an errand turned into a poem it belongs with the request for the sword-strap in the twenty-second section.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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