Omoiki ya hakanaku okishi sode no ue no tsuyu o katami ni kaken mono to wa

English Translation

Did I ever think—
that the dew so fleetingly
settled on the sleeves
I would come to wear
as a keepsake of the dead?

Meaning

Could I ever have imagined it—that the dew that settled so fleetingly on those sleeves would be something I would wear as a keepsake of the dead?

Commentary

Book Eight Lament Poems 776

Headnote: "Imperial reply."
This is the second poem of the sequence remembering the dead through the things of autumn, a reply to the preceding poem. It answers that she never imagined she would wear as a keepsake the dew that settled so fleetingly on the sleeves. The headnote says "Imperial reply," Jōtōmon'in's answer to Izumi Shikibu's poem before it.
A daughter of Fujiwara no Michinaga, the author became the empress of Emperor Ichijō and the mother of Emperors Go-Ichijō and Go-Suzaku, and later received the title Jōtōmon'in.
The scene is the same time after Koshikibu no Naishi's death as the preceding poem, and the place is not recorded.
The direct occasion is the reply to the poem presented by Izumi Shikibu with the keepsake jacket in the preceding poem.

In the first line, "omoiki ya," "ki" marks the past and "ya" is rhetorical, meaning "did I ever think so? I never did." The poem pauses after the first line and, through inversion, continues into "mono to wa" in the last line.
The second line, "hakanaku okishi," takes up "oku to mishi" and "hakanakute" from the preceding poem. It speaks of the dew woven into the jacket as dew that settled fleetingly.
The third line, "sode no ue no," means "on the sleeves" of the jacket that Koshikibu no Naishi wore.
The fourth line, "tsuyu o katami ni," takes up "tsuyu" from the preceding poem and sees the dew that remained unvanished as a keepsake of the dead.
In the last line, "kaken mono to wa," "kake" means to wear a garment. "N" expresses conjecture, meaning "that I would come to wear it as a keepsake," which returns to "omoiki ya" in the first line. Where the preceding poem said that the dew remained yet the daughter could be likened to nothing, the reply receives it by making that very dew a keepsake. The next poem, 777, also sings of dew as a keepsake with an almost identical run of phrases, "hakanaku kieshi kusa no ue no tsuyu o katami to," and the two poems are placed side by side.

Author

Fujiwara no Shōshi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other