Omoisome mono o koso omoe kyō yori wa aoi haruka ni nari ya shinuramu

English Translation

I have begun to
love, and to be full of thought;
and from this day on,
will the hollyhock day of
meeting be far off from me?

Meaning

I have begun to love, and to be full of thought; and from this day on, will the day of meeting be far off from me?

Commentary

68 The Yamato-Seeming Woman: The Exchange on Mount Miwa

One day in the fourth month she took Michitsuna with her to Chisokuin. On the way back they saw a lady's carriage of some distinction; Michitsuna followed it and traced it to a house at the foot of Mount Miwa. The next day he sent the lady a poem. She said she had no idea what it meant, but he sent another, and she answered.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, eighteen that year. The text calls the woman only the Yamato-seeming person and gives no name. Mount Miwa is a poetic place in Yamato, known from the old poem in which a cedar marks the house one is to visit.
It is the fourth month of the third year of Tenroku, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
Coming back from Chisokuin, where the author had taken Michitsuna, they saw a lady's carriage of some distinction; Michitsuna followed it and traced it to a house at the foot of Mount Miwa. The next day he sent the lady this poem.
She said she had no idea what it meant. Michitsuna sent another, "Warinaku mo sugi tachinikeru kokoro kana miwa no yamamoto tazune hajimete," and she answered.

The opening means to begin to feel, the word that announces the start of a love. The second, bound by an emphatic particle, declares that he is full of thought. So far the poem says only that a love has begun toward a woman glimpsed the day before. The third marks off the time: from today onward. The word in the fourth is the hollyhock and also the day of meeting, and on it the poem turns; the fourth month is the month of the Kamo festival, when hollyhock is worn, so that the season's own plant carries the sense of a meeting. The close asks, in the conjectural mood, whether that day will be far off — so that from the very day the love begins its distance is already the subject. To state the beginning and the remoteness in one breath is the poem's whole posture, and as a first approach it is conventionally well made. Set beside the poem Kaneie sent the author at the opening of the first book, which announced his suit outright and without any go-between, the son's verse begins quietly and by way of a seasonal word — a visible difference of manner.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other