A Painting of Nothing but Egrets, Kept by the Reverend On溫上人所蓄獨畫鷺鷥圖
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) 東國李相國集 · Yi Gyubo · Compiled 1241 (Goryeo, 28th year of King Gojong); revised and enlarged 1251 · 1 passages · 159 Chinese characters · reading time 1.6 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 10 The collected writings of Yi Gyubo of Goryeo, gathered and cut in woodblock by his son Yi Ham in 1241 and revised and enlarged by his grandson Yi Ikbae in 1251. It holds poems and rhapsodies, memorials and reports sent up to the king, records written for temples and pagodas, stele and tomb inscriptions, letters and prefaces, and the state letters that passed to and from the Mongols during the invasions. The Lay of King Dongmyeong, which sings the founder of Goguryeo, stands in volume 3 of the first collection, and the daily life of a man who called himself the White Cloud Layman — with his wine, his zither and his verse — fills the later collection. The book closes with the last poem he wrote as his eyes failed and he laid down the brush, and with the dirge and tomb inscription others made for him after his death.
Have you not seen how, under the Academician's brush, it knew long ago how to draw out an idle heart,
coming and going, standing alone beside the sandy isle?
Whose painter's hand got its teaching from a god, that the subtle intent of its colors
faintly resembles the bowels of an exiled immortal?
At first I did not grasp the painter's taste,
and propping my chin, leaning on the wall, I quietly reckoned it over.
If he had already painted the strange and surpassing mood of river and lake,
why did he not paint fishermen and boatmen coming and going at their ease?
If he had already painted the egret in its moment of fulfilled intent,
why did he not paint swimming fish and scuttling crabs going in and out and rippling the water?
Sunk in thought and silently reckoning, at last I knew for myself
that what the intent did not reach was precisely what lay hidden there.
The white egret, when it sees a man, shakes out its wings on the sand-head
and with one sudden start flies up in alarm.
The white egret, when it spies a fish, plants its feet among the reeds
and stands stock-still, hard to bend or to raise.
How could one let the idle, unconstrained form of that snow-white visitor
be startled and hurried like a sparrow?
Few know this intent,
so I have made a song and a poem and brought it out at last.