菖蒲草根に顯るゝ今日こそは
いつかと待ちしかひもありけれ
いつかと待ちしかひもありけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Ayamegusa ne ni arawaruru kyō koso wa itsuka to machishi kai mo arikere
- English Translation
-
Today the sweet flag
shows itself, root and sound at
once; and now at last
all that waiting, all that asking
when, has not been for nothing.
- Meaning
- Today the sweet flag shows itself, root and sound at once; and all that waiting, all that asking when, has not been for nothing.
- Commentary
-
69 The Sweet Flag Poems: The Consort's Daughter and the Yamato-Seeming Woman
The fifth month came. The author had sweet flag brought in, threaded it and made a scented ball, and gave it to Michitsuna to be presented to the young lady of that house, with a poem. Her mother sent an answer. Michitsuna prepared a second scented ball and sent it with a poem of his own to the woman he had been writing to, and she replied.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, eighteen that year. Neither the young lady to whom the ball was presented nor her mother, who wrote the answer, is named in the text. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she too is unnamed. The scented ball, hung up on the fifth day of the fifth month to drive off harm, is made of sweet flag and mugwort bound with threads.
It is the fifth month of the third year of Tenroku, and the place is the residence of the young lady.
It is the answer of the young lady's mother to the poem the author sent with the scented ball.
Michitsuna then prepared a second scented ball and sent the woman "Waga sode wa hiku to nurashitsu ayamegusa hito no tamoto ni kakete kawakase."
She takes back the sweet flag and the root. The opening resets the plant and passes to the second line. The word for root also means a sound or a word from someone, and on it the poem turns: the actual sight of a root brought up out of the ground carries the sense that a long-silent correspondence has made itself heard. Where the other had spoken of a deep root that nobody knew of, this receives that root as having shown itself today, turning the figure from concealment toward disclosure. The third line names the day of the festival, its emphatic particle governing the close. The fourth means: waiting and wondering when. The close declares that the waiting has not been in vain. Thanks for a gift are converted into pleasure at a letter long awaited, and the whole is built on the single word for root, setting hiding and showing against each other.
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- To wait and look for you at Miwa would be an ill-omened thing; so, even if a cedar stands there, I cannot let you know of it.
- In the hidden marsh it began to grow, the sweet flag — and with no one to know of it, these roots that reach down so deep, so deep below.
- My own sleeve I have wetted, drawing it — this sweet flag; hang it, then, on your own sleeve, and let it dry there, if it is to dry at all.
- Of the sleeve you say you wetted, I know nothing. Do not, I beg you, hang the sweet flag upon a sleeve that can make no sense of it.