Ueshi ueba aki naki toki ya sakazaramu hana koso chirame ne sae kareme ya

English Translation

Planted, and planted
well, it will fail to flower
only in a time
with no autumn. The blossom
may fall — but will the root die

Meaning

Planted, and planted well, it will fail to flower only in a season with no autumn. The blossom may fall; but will the root die too?

Commentary

163 When There Is No Autumn

The empress having asked Captain Ariwara for chrysanthemums, he sent them, and wrote this poem to go with them. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Captain Ariwara is Ariwara no Narihira, who exchanges poems with the Lady of Nijō in the hundred and sixty-first section and receives the grass of forgetting in the hundred and sixty-second. The chrysanthemum is an autumn flower, also used in poems wishing long life.
The setting is the empress's request for the flowers. The chrysanthemums tell us it is autumn.
What prompted the poem was the sending of them. It was written to accompany the flowers.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded.

The opening doubles its verb: planted, and well planted.
What follows says it will fail to flower only in a season with no autumn; and the word for autumn also carries the sense of growing tired of someone, so that the plant's need of autumn and a love's need of constancy stand together.
The next line concedes that the blossom may fall.
The closing question is rhetorical: will the root die? It will not — and the verb for withering is also the verb for growing distant. Flowers fall and roots remain; so, he says, the outward tie may end and the root of feeling will not. A poem accompanying a gift to an empress, conducted throughout in the language of love.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other