Matching the rhymes of Pak, Director of the Secretariat, who answered the poem I gave my son-in-law in thanks for the gayageum, then came to visit and gave it to me次韻朴中舍和予贈予壻謝加耶琴詩來訪見贈
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 · 120 Chinese characters · reading time 1.3 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 4 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.
If what one delights in is not a true delight,
it is only the business of offering smiles and falling in with others.
It is following one's own liking in each thing;
otherwise no cherishing heart arises.
My nature has loved the zither from the first —
not wine, and not a woman's beauty.
My joy, too, lies within it,
and it is ample to unfold a stifled breast.
What is borrowed from another must at once be given back,
and wherever I went there was nowhere I was not troubled with searching.
I ask you: where did you come to know,
that you met the very thing I sought so anxiously?
My son-in-law is truly a man after my heart,
and in our house he is called trustworthy and upright.
He looked into what I earnestly wished for,
and you too were moved a little.
You then sent it readily,
and when it is played its sound splits stone.
The fault is that my hand, long idle, is clumsy,
but my eye is bright and glad at what is newly got.
And more, I taste your rare writing again,
and it seems no food cooked over fire.
I play the gayageum and chant poems as well,
and my cares are loosed all at once.