Nabete yo no uki ni nagaruru ayamegusa kyō made kakaru ne wa ikaga miru

English Translation

Through the whole sad world
it drifts and is carried off
the sweet flag; and now
how do you look on a root
that has hung on to this day

Meaning

The sweet flag drifts on the general sorrow of the world; and this root, that has held on until today, how does it look to you?

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 223

Headnote: in the days when their rooms adjoined, they sat up together through the night of the sixth day of the fifth month, and in the morning she wrapped a long root and sent it to Murasaki Shikibu.
The third poem on the festival, and the first of two exchanges. The headnote records that the two women, whose rooms were side by side, kept vigil together and that in the morning she sent a long sweet-flag root wrapped up. The poem that follows is the reply.
Joto Mon-in no Koshosho was a lady-in-waiting and poet in the service of Empress Shoshi, consort of Emperor Ichijo. Her dates are not recorded. She is known to have been close to Murasaki Shikibu.
The time is the morning of the sixth day of the fifth month; the place is the palace apartments.
The occasion was the sending of the root.

The adverb in the first line means generally, on the whole, and the sorrow of the world at large is set down first.
The adjective in the second line means painful, unwelcome; the verb means both to be carried on water and to pass one's life as if adrift. Sweet flag grows at the water's edge, so that the verb belongs with the plant as well.
The third line names it. The word for the plant also means the sense or reason of a thing, and the reply that follows uses that meaning.
The verb in the fourth line means both to be thus and to hang long, as a root does; the phrase before it counts the days of survival.
The word for root at the close also carries the sound of weeping, the pivot used in Shunzei's two hundred and twenty-first poem. The festival custom of sending a long root becomes the vehicle of a question about a life of hardship.

Author

Joto Mon-in no Koshosho

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other