Again, Watching the Tide from the Pavilion, Given to My Colleague Master Kim又樓上觀潮。贈同寮金君。
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 · 166 Chinese characters · reading time 1.6 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 16 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.
The force of the sea tide is mighty — how is it so like madness?
As if a thousand armored soldiers ran at double pace, vying to be first.
The place where travelers raised dust at every step
becomes in a moment a broad spread of rivers and ponds.
Then suddenly it is rolled away again and becomes level ground,
and I rather suspect the blue sea has turned to mulberry fields in a single morning.
I had boasted that the inlet swallows what is wide,
but when it spews forth it becomes a pit hard to fill again.
Not only the changing shapes within the water are so:
the sun and moon above the sky also wane and wax.
That things fill and dwindle is of itself the constant principle;
this is the course of Heaven, not something slanted toward this place alone.
The tide comes and goes again,
and the boats coming and going follow head to tail.
Leaving beneath this pavilion in the morning,
before midday they row into the sky of the southern barbarians.
People say a boat is a post-station upon the water,
but I say that even a steed chasing the wind, set beside it, is still slow.
If a lone sail were to go as it does in the wind,
it seems it would reach the immortals of Penglai (蓬萊) all at once.
How much more the trifling realms of Man and Chu (蠻觸) —
borrowing this sea route, where could one not go against the current or with it?
Interlinear notes 1
予以公事往來數月
I went back and forth for some months on official business.