わが袖は引くとぬらしつあやめ草
人のたもとにかけてかわかせ
人のたもとにかけてかわかせ
- Roma-ji
-
Waga sode wa hiku to nurashitsu ayamegusa hito no tamoto ni kakete kawakase
- English Translation
-
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.
- Meaning
- I have wetted my own sleeve in drawing it up — this sweet flag. Hang it on your sleeve, then, and let it dry there.
- 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 woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
Michitsuna prepared a second scented ball and sent this poem with it to the woman.
She answered with "Hikitsuramu tamoto wa shirazu ayamegusa ayanaki sode ni kakezu mo aranamu."
The opening sets his own sleeve in place and passes to the second line. The verb there means to pull the flag up out of the marsh and also to be drawn in feeling, and on it the poem turns: the actual business of wading in and wetting a sleeve to gather the plant is laid over the wetting of a sleeve with tears. The third names the gift itself, and the fourth turns to the other's sleeve. The close means: hang it there and let it dry — describing the actual use of a scented ball, hung at the sleeve, while pleading that whether his own wet sleeve dries depends on her. Where his mother's poem to the young lady spoke of the depth of a hidden root, the son's speaks of a wetted sleeve; the same plant serves in one case for reflection and in the other for a suit of love. That mother's and son's poems should stand side by side is one of the things to notice in this section.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Truly, could I have lain down with my heart at ease? The cuckoo's calling, I think, would only turn out a voice that deepens brooding.