Master Im Again Asked for an Old-Style Poem on a Screen Painted with a Coiling Pine, so I Had Master Jin Call Out the Rhymes Once More and Composed It林君又以畫盤松屛風。請古詩走筆。復使陳君唱韻賦之。
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 · 133 Chinese characters · reading time 1.3 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 13 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.
Long ago, crossing Gangnam (江南), the startled waves were like flying snow,
and ten thousand valleys surged as if collapsing, as though thunder and lightning tore them.
The boat rose and fell with the waves,
and in their midst one dragon stood out.
I rose and, matching myself against its head and horns, looked closely;
it brushed past my eyes and all at once was gone again.
A dragon would be bent like a bow,
a pine would be hard as iron.
If the pine is not hard it seems to have no bone;
if the dragon does not bend it seems to have no blood.
Now I look at this pine, and how like that shape it is,
bending its waist and laying its flank crosswise, rearing and crouching in a cave of thousand-year-old cloud and wave.
Luckily that year I sought out the immortal beneath the water
and passed through all the gold and silver palaces of the isle of Bongnae.
Without having seen a dragon, how could one know a pine?
Lifting its whiskers, shaking its mane, it would run and then seems about to fall back.
You are a true dragon; how should you lie coiled in here?
Wait well for the third month of spring, when the peach-blossom waters rise.