Shionomitsu itsumonourano itsumoitsumo kimiobafukaku omouhayawaga

English Translation

Where the tide comes in
at the bay they call Itsumo
always, always so
it is you I think upon
deeply, deeply — yes, it is I

Meaning

As the tide comes always in at Itsumo Bay, so always and always I think of you deeply — I do.

Commentary

23 The Northeast Corner of the Seiryōden

The passage opens with the painted screen in the northeast corner of the Seiryōden, showing a rough sea and long-armed, long-legged creatures. By the balustrade stands a tall blue vase filled with branches of cherry blossom some five feet long, the flowers spilling out past the railing. Around midday the Major Counsellor arrives in a cherry-coloured court robe and speaks with the Emperor. Within the blinds the ladies have let their outer robes slip loose, their sleeves pushed out beneath the screens. Amid the sound of the imperial meal being carried in and the guards' warning cries on a soft, unhurried day, the Empress pushes aside her curtain of state and comes out to the threshold, softly reciting a line of old verse. She then folds a sheet of white paper and tells her ladies each to write down an old poem they can recall at that moment. Told to grind the ink, the author is too distracted to attend to it, and when pressed she flushes to the face in confusion.

The Major Counsellor is Fujiwara no Korechika, heir of the Regent Michitaka and elder brother of Empress Teishi by the same mother. The Middle Captain of the Third Rank who wrote this poem is Fujiwara no Michitaka, father of both the Empress and Korechika, who later rose from Regent to Chancellor. Retired Emperor En'yū was the father of Emperor Ichijō.

The setting is the Seiryōden; the poem itself belongs to an earlier reign, recalled there in conversation.

The game of writing old poems on paper leads the Empress into a story of the past: Retired Emperor En'yū once told his courtiers each to write a poem in a booklet. Many shrank from it, until he said he would hold neither poor handwriting nor an out-of-season poem against them, and so, reluctantly, all of them wrote. This was one of the verses set down.

Michitaka altered the closing line from "it is you I think upon" to "it is you I trust in," and the Retired Emperor praised it warmly. Hearing the story, the author breaks into an unaccountable sweat and reflects that no young person could have written so. Indeed, even those who normally write well had held back and spoiled their sheets.

The first two lines serve as a preface leading to what follows: the tide that comes in always at the bay named Itsumo calls up the adverb of the third line. Place name and adverb share a sound, so that the picture of a tide forever returning slides directly into the unbrokenness of feeling. The repetition in the third line refuses any gap in time. In the fourth line the object particle is reinforced so that it is you, and no one else, who is singled out. The closing line ends on an exclamatory particle with the subject held back to the very last, leaving the sentence half-said and the feeling still ringing.

Michitaka's change turns a private longing into something a subject may properly say to a sovereign: to think of someone is one-sided devotion, while to trust in someone is to rely on them, to put oneself in their hands. What is prized is not the making of a new poem but the shifting of a single word in an old one so that it fits the moment — the same device as the altered "Toshifureba yowaiwaoinu shikawaaredo hanaoshimireba monoomoimonashi" in this same section. The two anecdotes together show the passage treating knowledge of old poetry and quickness of wit as one continuous virtue.

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other