おもひやる心の空になりぬれば
今朝は時雨ると見ゆるなるらむ
今朝は時雨ると見ゆるなるらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Omoiyaru kokoro no sora ni narinureba kesa wa shiguru to miyuru naru ramu
- English Translation
-
Because my own heart
has gone out to you and turned
to sky, this morning
must look to you as though the
cold rain were falling from it.
- Meaning
- Because my heart, in thinking of you, has become all sky, this morning must appear to you as though cold rain were falling.
- Commentary
-
4 Exchanges with Kaneie
After the marriage was settled, the author stayed for a time at a temporary lodging. Kaneie visited her there and sent a letter the next morning. In the ninth month a run of days of abstinence kept him away for two nights together, and only letters passed. His visits then grew infrequent; on a rainy evening he sent word that he would come, and in the tenth month he pleaded abstinence as a reason for staying away. Poems were exchanged on each occasion, and the author's helplessness as the one who waits accumulates through them. While these exchanges continue, the day approaches when her father Tomoyasu must go down to Mutsu.
Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and at this time Assistant Commander of the Right Guards; he would rise to be regent and chancellor. The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu, a man of the provincial governor class who would go down to Mutsu as its governor at the end of this year.
It is the end of the ninth month in the eighth year of Tenryaku, and the place is the author's own dwelling.
It came back by return, in answer to her complaint that the sky was raining upon a sleeve whose tears had not yet dried.
Before she had finished her reply to it, Kaneie himself appeared. Some while after this his visits grew infrequent, and "Kashiwagi no mori no shitakusa kuregoto ni nao tanome to ya moru o miru miru" was composed.
He takes her morning, her cold rain and her sky and returns them unchanged. The opening verb means to let one's thoughts go out toward another's situation. The second line, that his heart has become all sky, turns what she had said of the actual weather into a condition of the mind. The fourth line says not that rain is falling but that it appears to be falling, so that both her tears and the rain are laid to the state of his own heart. The closing auxiliary is conjectural, softening the assertion. Reproached for two nights of absence, he offers no direct apology but insists that his heart has been with her all along — a fine instance of the deflecting manner proper to exchange poetry.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kaneie
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- Set by a hedgerow I never looked to stand at, the pink holds no dew upon its flower at all — nothing gathers, nothing stays.
- The dew that faded has not yet dried on my sleeve, and this morning even the sky comes down in cold rain — it is more than I can bear.
- The grass beneath the oak grove: at each fall of dusk am I told to hope once more — while I watch the rain come leaking through the branches?
- Sighing, you turn your robe inside out; and its damp must be why the sky adds, on top of everything, this cold rain of its own now.