かりにくと恨みし人の絶えにしを
草葉につけて偲ぶころかな
草葉につけて偲ぶころかな
- Roma-ji
-
Kari ni ku to uramishi hito no taenishi o kusaba ni tsukete shinobu koro kana
- English Translation
-
Only for a while
he came, and I resented
and now he comes not
and by these blades of grasses
I think of him even now
- Meaning
- I resented him for coming only in passing; and now he has stopped altogether, and the blades of grass bring him to mind.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 187
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The fourth poem on summer grasses. Thick grass brings to mind a person who no longer comes. The original gives neither a fresh headnote nor a fresh attribution, which indicates the same poet as before.
The poet is Sone no Yoshitada, as in the previous poem.
The time is when the summer grasses are thick; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line means: he comes only in passing. The word for in passing also carries the sense of coming to cut grass, so that it belongs with the blades named below: a phrase of love poetry and a word of the fields joined in one.
The second line names the person resented for that, placing the old grievance in the past.
The third line has the visits cease altogether, and the particle works almost concessively: she resented him when he came at all, and now not even that is left.
The fourth line means: on seeing the grass. The thickening blades are what set the memory going.
The verb at the close means to think of with longing. A poem on summer grass is made to carry a love, and where the previous piece by the same poet described a garden, this one turns to people.
- Author
- Sone no Yoshitada
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Under the hemp field let the low grass grow thickly only because it bears the name of the flower I parted from too early
- In the garden where the flowers fell, the leaves are thick against the sky and the light of the moon there shining above comes rarely
- The grass of summer has grown so thick, so thickly that on the jewelled road, those who pass along it can knot it as they go by
- The grass of summer has grown thick, and even so the cuckoo has not come to my house here, and why has it not given one cry