Aki no yo o mate to tanomeshi koto no ha ni ima mo kakareru tsuyu no hakanasa

English Translation

On the leaves of those
words that bade me wait until
the autumn nights came
there hangs, even now, the dew —
and how frail a thing it is

Meaning

On the leaves of those words that bade me wait for the autumn nights, the dew still hangs — and how frail a thing it is.

Commentary

115 Dew on the Leaves of Words

When the Minister of the Right was Head Chamberlain, he sent "Aki no yo o mate to tanomeshi koto no ha ni ima mo kakareru tsuyu no hakanasa" to a woman known as the Nurse of Shōni, and her reply was "Aki mo kozu tsuyu mo okanedo koto no ha wa waga tame ni koso iro kawarikere". That is the whole of the section.
The Minister of the Right rose to that office; here the events belong to his time as Head Chamberlain, the officer at the head of those serving closest to the emperor. Of the Nurse of Shōni the prose tells us only the title her name comes from.
The season is autumn, as the autumn nights in the poem tell us.
The prose records nothing further of what prompted it, saying only that he sent it to her while he was Head Chamberlain.
She answered with a poem of her own, and the exchange closes the section. This poem was later included in the Shokugosen-shū.

The opening recalls words that told him to wait for the autumn nights; the verb means to give someone something to count on. He begins from what she once said.
Words are called leaves, as in the eighty-first section; and being leaves, they take dew.
The dew still hanging on them is, now that autumn has come, the tears of a promise unkept.
The poem ends on that frailty, named and left standing. Making words into leaves lets dew settle on them, and the dew becomes tears. A promise unfulfilled is stated through one continuous image of leaf and dew.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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