心をばとどめてこそは帰りつれ
あやしや何の暮れを待つらむ
あやしや何の暮れを待つらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Kokoro o ba todomete koso wa kaeritsure ayashi ya nani no kure o matsuramu
- English Translation
-
My heart I left there,
leaving it behind with you
as I went back home —
how strange, then: what is it in me
that waits for evening to come
- Meaning
- I came home only after leaving my heart behind with you; how strange it is, then, that something in me still waits for evening.
- Commentary
-
Book Eight Love Poems II 236
On leaving the beloved, the poet left his heart behind with her, yet something in him still longs for the evening when they can meet again, and he wonders what it could be. Turning his own logic of the abandoned heart on its head, he wittily conveys a longing he cannot restrain.
The first line, "kokoro o ba" (my heart), singles out the heart with the emphatic "ba."
The second line, "todomete koso wa" (having left it), stresses with "koso" that the heart was left behind. Poem 241 of this book uses the same verb in "kokoro o todometsuru kana."
The third line, "kaeritsure," closes "koso" with the perfective form of the perfective "tsu," a kakari-musubi with a break after the third line.
The fourth line, "ayashi ya nani no," exclaims at the strangeness with the interjectory "ya" and leads to the question of what could be waiting when the heart is gone.
The final line, "kure o matsuramu," uses the conjectural "ramu" to ask what it is that waits for evening. Evening is the hour of visiting a lover, and the poem leads on to 238 of this book, which laments the slowness of the day's end.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shika Wakashu
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