Written on Seeing Children Playing with Trifoliate Oranges見兒童弄枳有作
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 · 80 Chinese characters · reading time 0.8 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 8 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.
It is of one kind with the tangerine,
yet it changed in crossing the Huai River.
Its shape it has kept entire,
but its fragrance it has not.
It is as though a person's nature were good
and the habits of a place had shifted it altogether.
Within there is white flesh,
but it is far too sour to be fit to eat.
It might do as the tangerine's servant,
yet even the name of the tangerine's servant is more than it deserves.
One who changes his nature is a petty man,
and I have no wish to look upon him.
Why is it, then, that the children
play the whole day long with these round things?
Not only do they play with them,
they chew them with their teeth and are slow to throw them away.