誰が里も問ひもや来ると時鳥
心の限り待ちぞわびにし
心の限り待ちぞわびにし
- Roma-ji
-
Taga sato mo toi mo ya kuru to hototogisu kokoro no kagiri machi zo wabinishi
- English Translation
-
At whichever house
it may come and call, I thought
and for the cuckoo
I waited with all my heart
until the waiting wore me
- Meaning
- Whosever house it might visit, I waited for the cuckoo with all my heart, until the waiting itself wore me out.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 204
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The poem is worn out with waiting, and stands at the close of the run on waiting for the cuckoo. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Murasaki Shikibu is the author of the Tale of Genji. This is her second appearance in this book, after the hundred and ninety-first poem.
The time is a summer night; the place is the poet's house.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line of the text does not agree with the phonetic line given beside it; the reading of the text itself is followed here, in the sense of whosever village it may be.
The first line means: at whosever village. The thought reaches beyond her own house to anywhere at all. Ben no Menoto's hundred and ninety-second poem likewise thought of other ears than her own.
In the second line an interrogative particle stands with a quotative one: thinking that it might come and call.
The third line names what is waited for.
The fourth line means to the limit of the heart, with everything one has.
The verb at the close means to be worn down, to be troubled, and an emphatic particle governs the attributive form. The waiting itself has become a hardship. With the hundred and ninety-ninth poem, on the habit of waiting, it takes the waiting mind for its subject.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Rain is pouring on the flowering orange tree and the wind goes through and the mountain cuckoo cries somewhere up among the clouds
- I should have just slept and never heard it at all cuckoo, for it leaves everything half done, that one cry of yours in the deep night
- Night upon night now I have waited past waiting and the mountain's bird far off, beyond the cloud-track has given one cry, no more
- Until I have heard a second cry I'll not leave cuckoo, though I lie however many nights here at the anchorage, waking