いにしへのなきに流るる水茎の
跡こそ袖のうらに寄りけれ
跡こそ袖のうらに寄りけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Inishie no naki ni nagaruru mizuguki no ato koso sode no ura ni yorikere
- English Translation
-
Of days long ago,
no more, and wept for, flowing,
the brush's stream—
it is on my sleeve's inner shore
that its traces have come to rest.
- Meaning
- The brush traces of days long gone, flowing on the tears I weep for one who is no more, have come to rest, like waves upon a shore, on the lining of my sleeves.
- Commentary
-
Book Eight Lament Poems 807
Headnote: "Reply."
This is the third poem of the sequence remembering the dead through their handwriting, a reply to the preceding poem. It answers that the brush traces flowing on tears of grief for the one who is gone have come to rest on the lining of her sleeves. The headnote says "Reply," answering Uma no Naishi's poem before it.
A daughter of Prince Shigeakira, son of Emperor Daigo, the author served as Ise Priestess and then became a consort of Emperor Murakami, and was called the Consort of the Ise Priestess. She is one of the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals.
The scene is the same time after Emperor Murakami's death as the preceding poem, set at the residence of the Consort of the Ise Priestess.
The direct occasion is the reply to the poem sent by Uma no Naishi in the preceding poem.
The first line, "inishie no," means "of days long gone," referring to the time when Emperor Murakami was alive.
In the second line, "naki ni nagaruru," "naki" is a pivot word meaning both "naki," no longer here, of the one of the past, and "naki," weeping. "Nagaruru" means for tears to flow and is also a word associated with the "water" of "mizuguki" in the third line.
The third line, "mizuguki no," takes up the third line of the preceding poem, "mizuguki no," as it is.
In the fourth line, "ato koso sode no," "ato" takes up "ato wa kakute mo" from the preceding poem. "Koso" is an emphatic binding particle, completed by "kere" in the realis form in the last line.
In the last line, "ura ni yorikere," "ura" is a pivot word meaning both the "lining" of the sleeve and a "shore" where waves come in. It strings together words of water: "nagaruru," "mizuguki," "ura," and "yoru." Where the preceding poem said that the course of the brush traces is unknown, the reply shows where they have gone: the flowing traces have come to rest on the lining of sleeves wet with tears.
- Author
- Princess Kishi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- As idle scribbling, as a trace of no account, so I looked on it— yet it has become a keepsake that will last a long time.
- Though I seek it out, though the traces stay written thus, like the brush's stream its course is lost to me— such is the past, I find.
- Sleeves never dried, in the darkness of my robes I am made blind, and heedless of the moon I have wandered from my way.
- Deep in the water the thousand lights, my father's, are mirrored there, yet his form of days gone by is nowhere to be seen.