Matching the Rhymes of the Reply Sent by Vice Minister Yi Su次韻李侍郞需見和
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 · 87 Chinese characters · reading time 0.9 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 9 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 greatest among things is the black-haired creature, that is to say man,
yet those who live out the span of years allotted them are few indeed.
How much more, then, among the grasses and the trees:
which of them lasts long, and which of them but a moment?
I only wonder that the snow and all the other flowers,
being alike the work of Heaven's handiwork,
differ in their being born and being gone, because the cold and warm seasons differ,
so that it is hard to argue out the sense in which we call them all alike flowers.
Now that I look at what you have said,
you are truly like one who wields the work of creation.
What should even the maker of the ten thousand things know of it?
You have sorted out the like from the unlike and shut out another's falsehood.
Your argument, high and outstanding though it is,
is on the whole much like my own.