Tou koe wa itsu to nakeredo hototogisu akete kuyashiki mono o koso omoe

English Translation

There is no fixed hour
at which a voice comes asking;
but the cuckoo, when
it opens — when the day breaks —
finds only cause to regret.

Meaning

There is no fixed hour at which a voice comes asking; but the cuckoo, when day breaks and nothing opens, finds only cause for regret.

Commentary

89 His Visit and the Exchange the Next Morning

On the night of the twenty-second of the fourth month, the appointed day, the Master of the Right Stables came and begged the author that he might at least be let inside the blinds and speak with the young lady; but that too was refused, and he went home without so much as a torch. The next morning the author sent him a poem, and he answered.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Master of the Right Stables was a younger brother of Kaneie; the text gives only his office, and a marginal note in the base text identifies him as Fujiwara no Tōdo. The blinds hung between a room and the outside, and whether a man was admitted within them marked the degree of intimacy allowed him.
It is the twenty-third of the fourth month of the second year of Tenen, and the place is the Master's residence.
It answers the author's poem, which had wondered how dark his road home through the hills must have been.
After this exchange he goes on pressing his suit and keeps summoning Michitsuna; and in time the account comes to the paintings Michitsuna brought home, on which the author wrote poems.

He takes back her cuckoo. The first two lines mean that there is no fixed time at which the asking voice comes: told that he went off without saying he would return, he answers that a cuckoo's call has no appointed hour either. The third line makes himself that bird and passes to the fourth, where the verb means that day breaks and also that a blind is opened, and on it the poem turns; the outcome of the night before, that day came without his being let inside the blinds, is gathered into that double sense. The close is bound by an emphatic particle: he is left with nothing but regret. Where she had troubled herself about the darkness of his road, he says nothing of the dark and speaks instead of the bitterness of the day breaking — accepting her concern and returning a complaint about the failure itself. In the first book, at "Nagekitsutsu hitori nuru yo no akuru ma wa ikani hisashiki mono to ka wa shiru," breaking and opening were likewise folded together, and the pattern of a poem made before a closed door is used again here.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other