Yume bakari mite shi bakari ni madoitsutsu akuru zo osoki ama no tozashi wa

English Translation

Having seen you for
no more than the space of a
dream, I go on lost;
and slow indeed it is to
open — the gate of heaven.

Meaning

Having seen you for no more than the space of a dream, I go on bewildered; and slow indeed it is to open — that gate of heaven.

Commentary

72 Grief at the Bon Festival; The Yamato-Seeming Woman: The Exchange on White Paper

There was grief about the time of the Bon festival, and then a warning of death, after which she kept silence for a time. When the eighth month too had passed, Michitsuna, unable to believe that any of the woman's answers were in her own hand, sent her a poem in reproach. She answered on white paper, and he wrote again. From then on, whenever no answer came, he sent another poem.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she is unnamed. At that period a woman's replies were often written for her by an attendant, so that whether a letter was in her own hand served as a measure of what she felt.
It is after the eighth month of the third year of Tenroku had passed, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
No answer came to the Furu poem either, and the woman said she was under abstinence for that day and the next. Early on the morning when he judged it to be over, he sent this.
She still put him off with one excuse and another, and Michitsuna sent "Samo koso wa katsuragiyama ni naretarame tada hitokoto ya kagiri narikeru."

The opening means for no longer than a dream, saying that he caught only a glimpse. The second means that having so much as seen her was the beginning of everything. The third means that he goes on bewildered. The fourth means that the opening is slow in coming, its emphatic particle governing the close, which names the barred door of the heavenly rock cave, the standing figure for a door that will not open. The house that keeps its gate shut for a period of abstinence and sends no answer is likened to that cave. The lifting of an abstinence and the breaking of a day are held together in the one verb for opening, so that the length of the wait states itself. In the first book, at "Nagekitsutsu hitori nuru yo no akuru ma wa ikani hisashiki mono to ka wa shiru," the breaking of day and the opening of a gate were likewise folded into a single word, so that the pattern of composing on opening before a barred door has passed from mother to son.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other