Koishinobu kokoro ya taguu asayū ni yukite wa kaeru ochi no shirakumo

English Translation

Perhaps my longing
heart goes along beside them,
morning and evening
going out and coming back—
white clouds in the distances.

Meaning

Perhaps my longing heart travels with them: those far white clouds that go out and come back again, morning and evening.

Commentary

Section 21 Tamesuke's Fifty Poems and the Replies to Them

Through the summer, letters stopped coming to a strange degree, and her uneasiness was more than ordinary. News that waves were rising on the shore of Shiga and that there were disturbances at the Mountain and at Miidera made her more anxious still. At last, on the second of the eighth month, a messenger arrived, and she gathered up and read the letters that had been accumulating from various people. From the young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, came fifty poems, sent down without even a fair copy made, saying that he had composed them. His poems had grown very fine. That eighteen of the fifty should have earned her mark seemed to her strange, and doubtless her parent's blind love was at fault. Among them she found one poem, and taking it to have been written out of thought for her under a traveller's sky, she was moved, and beside that poem, in small characters, she wrote an answer and sent it back. Beside another poem on the same travel topic she likewise added an answer. Then, at the end of the fifty, she wrote a note, setting down her general remarks on the poems, and at the very end she added a poem of her own.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, is her son Tamesuke, called the Jiju since the section of parting poems, who on the day of her departure answered her with "Tsui ni yomo ada ni wa naraji moshiogusa katami o miyo no ato ni nokoseba." This section takes an unusual form for an exchange: she marks his fifty poems, and writes her replies in small characters beside them. The one long gone, named in the poem at the end, is the dead Tameie, the person to whom she would above all have liked to show these fifty.

After the second day of the eighth month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, over the fifty poems that had come from the capital.

It is the answer she wrote in small characters beside Tamesuke's "Kokoro nomi hedatezu tote mo tabigoromo yamaji kasanaru ochi no shirakumo."

Written in beside the marked poems, it went back to the capital with the fifty. Another reply was then added beside a second poem on the same topic.

A cloud that stood for separation is turned into a thing that carries the heart. The first line names the mother's longing plainly. The verb in the second line means to go along beside, and the interrogative particle frames the question: does my heart travel with them? The third line, morning and evening, marks that it happens over and over. The fourth line has the clouds going out and returning, reading as movement what the sent poem had set down as a fixed marker of distance, and there the work of the reply is done. The closing line hands back the sent poem's last line unchanged, and by putting the same words in the same place it declares itself an answer. Finding one thing that passes back and forth across a separation is the same consolation as in the Mikushige-dono's "Kakikurashi yuki furu sora no nagame ni mo hodo wa kumoi no aware o zo shiru" and her elder sister's "Tamazusa o miru ni namida no kakaru kana iso kosu kaze wa kiku kokochi shite"; here Abutsu-ni, who had been on the receiving end of it, uses it for her own child.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other