さかしらに柳の眉のひろごりて
春のおもてを伏する宿かな
春のおもてを伏する宿かな
- Roma-ji
-
Sakashirani yanaginomayuno hirogorite harunoomoteo fusuruyadokana
- English Translation
-
In a knowing way
the brows of the willow here
have spread themselves wide
and the very face of spring
hangs down for shame at this house
- Meaning
- Here the willow's brows have spread themselves out in a knowing way, and the face of spring hangs down for shame at this house.
- Commentary
-
301 Around the Third Month, Going Off for a Period of Abstinence
Around the third month, having to keep a period of ritual abstinence, the author went to stay at someone else's house. Among the trees there stood a willow with broad leaves and very little elegance about it, and when she remarked that surely that was no willow, someone answered that there were willows of this kind too.
Neither the owner of the house nor the person who answered is named.
The time is around the third month; the place is the house where she stayed for her abstinence.
The immediate occasion is being contradicted — that there are willows of this kind too — after she had said it could not be a willow.
The section goes on from here to an exchange with the Empress during another such stay, when she was bored and longing to return.
The first line throws out its judgement before anything else: knowingly, presumptuously. It is aimed at the willow, but the jab at whoever insisted there were willows like this sounds through it. The second line invokes the old conceit that likens the narrow leaves of a willow to a beautiful woman's brows, and with it the assumption that such brows ought to be fine.
The third line has them spreading wide. Brows that spread are brows gone wrong; the willow's loss of elegance is drawn as a face whose make-up has failed.
The fourth line moves from brow to face, and the close has spring itself hanging its head at this house, ending on an exclamatory particle.
Brow to face, face to house: the conceit widens by stages, so that a comment on one tree becomes a verdict on the whole place. The eye for distinguishing the elegant from the graceless, which the catalogue sections exercise again and again, is here turned on a garden tree at the house where she was lodging — set deliberately against the far more formal exchange with the Empress in the same section.
- Author
- Sei Shōnagon
- Source
- Makura no Soshi
- Other
-
- Through the sevenfold winding of the jewel's channel the cord was drawn through — that the ant is what passes do they not know it, even now
- Even to speak it is awe enough — that god's name and for a token I shall surely come to have the long years given the crane
- However was it that the days now gone were passed I can scarcely tell — yesterday and today here are days I can hardly live
- Even above clouds these spring days were hard to pass and all the while here I had gazed and thought it was only the place I was in