At Jin Hwa's House, Setting Out Wine and Beholding the Flowers; Written at a Running Brush After Growing Drunk陳澕家置酒賞花。醉後走筆。
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 · 109 Chinese characters · reading time 1.2 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 14 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.
In making a poem, unless the flower is a famed one,
no fair words come out from under the brush.
Meeting at last these red flowers, so like immortals,
I wished to unroll my silken bowels once.
But now that I see the beauty of this flower,
my purpose has reached its limit and I seem a fool instead.
All the morning long I hunt for a single line,
and chanting in pain I grieve like a cold cicada.
In the end good words are few;
facing the flower, what countenance can I put on?
The flower too smiles toward me,
and bending and lifting it seems to make sport of me.
It is as when a man of much feeling
has thought in vain of a single lovely woman,
and meeting her all at once by the roadside
stands face to face and vainly hesitates.
He only gazes without a word and says nothing at the last;
how much less can he speak of a good tryst.
I beg you, urge me to get drunk,
and I shall behold the lovely branches again.
If the poem comes out of the midst of drunkenness,
it may perhaps be a match for their fair form.