[17] Page 43--Quotation from an old poem. The owner of the field is hoping that the time will soon come for plucking the shoots. He is impatient, and sends the watchman to see if it is not yet time. This idea leads up to "Likewise dost haste" in one of the following lines.
[18] Page 43--A part of another old stanza.
[19] Page 44--Still another quotation from an old poem, introduced for the word _furu_. "To fall" and "old" are both _furu_ in Japanese, and "older leaves" in one of the following lines is _furu ha_.
[20] Page 44--_i. e._ Purple. As is common in Japanese poetry, the word purple is not actually used, but is called "the related colour." As a colour the Japanese word _Murasaki_ is purple, and it is also applied to a herb with deep purple-coloured flowers. This plant's colour is so intensely purple that all the herbs growing near it are supposed to show the same colour. From such an idea purple colour is known in poetry as _Yukari no iro_ (the related colour). In the present lines part of an old stanza is introduced for the sake of recalling the word _murasaki_, and this in turn leads on to _yukari no na_ in the first line of the Chorus.
[21] Page 44--According to an old tale a lover, crossing a pontoon bridge, fell between the boats and was drowned. The Chorus supposes the heroine to be thinking, "Like this man I too died because of love, and the 'Bridge of Love' is a name which is _related_ (see note 11) to my own destiny."
[22] Page 45--The Shepherd's Purse is one of the seven herbs. Choan is in China, and the old name of China was _Kara_, so that the mention of Choan brings _Kara_ to mind, which in turn suggests the word _karai_, hot, used in the next line.
[23] Page 45--The dawn is sometimes called the "whitening" in Japanese.
[24] Note the change of person, of course she has really been speaking of herself from the beginning.
[25] Page 47--_Ikuta_ means the living field, or field of life, and as she is about to die the name is meaningless to her.
[26] Page 47--Depending on an old poem in which the short growth of the summer horns is used to express the idea of brief time. An alternative translation of this line would be, "Short is my night's sleep, short are a stag's horns," but these words do not convey to an English reader anything like the meaning the Japanese carries. In the original the word _tsuka_ means either a "tomb" or a "grasp," and it acts as a pivot word. In the sense of "tomb" it leads to the weeds growing on her tomb, which is the essential part; and in the sense of "grasp" it suggests shortness, and inasmuch as a stag's horns are so short in summer as to be within the grasp of a hand, their shortness is suggested, and this in turn suggests a night's sleep in summer. This train of thought would probably not occur had it not been rendered a classical picture by an old and well-known stanza.