Tsuyu shigemi kusa no tamoto o makura ni te kimi matsumushi no ne o nomi zo naku

English Translation

The dew lies so thick
that I pillow my head on
sleeves grown grass-like — and
like the pine cricket that waits
for you, I do nothing but cry

Meaning

The dew lies so thick that I pillow my head on sleeves gone grass-like; and like the pine cricket that waits for you, I do nothing but cry.

Commentary

117 The Pine Cricket That Waits

The Katsura Princess sent this poem to Minamoto no Yoshitane. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Katsura Princess lived at Katsura and has poems in the twentieth, twenty-sixth, seventy-sixth, seventy-seventh and hundred and fourteenth sections. Minamoto no Yoshitane was the man who visited her; in the seventy-sixth he spends a night outside her gate, and in the seventy-seventh he likens himself to the old man of the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.
The season is autumn, as the pine cricket tells us.
The prose records nothing further of what prompted it, saying only that she sent it to him.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded. It was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.

The opening means that the dew lies thick, the grammar marking that as the cause of what follows.
Sleeves grown grass-like are sleeves wet with dew, the sleeve taken for grass. Sleeves wet with tears recur throughout this book.
The word in the fourth line means both waiting and the pine cricket, so that waiting for him and the cricket's singing are one word. The poem in the twenty-fourth section uses the same pun on a hill of pines.
The closing names a voice, with a particle of limitation and an emphatic particle together insisting that crying is all there is to do. Dew, grass and insect keep the autumn in view, and through them she states the case of a woman waiting.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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