Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems

A chant on the returning swallow, presented to the Grand Commandant歸燕吟獻太尉

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) 桂苑筆耕集 · Choe Chiwon · 886 (Tang, 6th year of the Zhonghe era · Silla, 12th year of King Heongang) · 1 passages · 56 Chinese characters · reading time 0.2 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 20 — Poems A collection Choe Chiwon made by choosing out of the writings of his four years in the headquarters of Gao Pian, military commissioner of Huainan under the Tang, binding them into twenty volumes and presenting them to King Heongang of Silla in 886. It holds 366 pieces — memorials and reports sent up to the emperor, the proclamation denouncing Huang Chao, letters to the several military commissioners, orders and dispatches issued to those under him, Daoist and Buddhist texts for services, funeral offerings, records written for the outer wall of Chengdu and for a painting of Annam, and the reports and poems he sent up to Gao Pian. Here is the first report, which begins "I am a man of Silla," and the proclamation against Huang Chao with its line, "Not only do all the men of the world think to kill you openly; the ghosts under the earth have already discussed cutting you down in secret." The last volume holds the poems he made on the voyage home to the country he had left at twelve. It is the oldest collection by a Korean that survives, and when Hong Seokju and Seo Yugu printed it with movable type in 1834 they called it "the root and the beginning of the writing of our Eastern Country." Their two prefaces are translated with it.

1Alone it yields the repaying of the ring, and the thought is not sweet

秋去春來能守信。暖風涼雨飽相諳。再依大廈雖知許。久汙雕梁却自慙。深避鷹鸇投海島。羨他鴛鷺戲江潭。只將名品齊黃雀。獨讓銜環意未甘。

Going in autumn and coming in spring, it can keep faith. Warm winds and cool rains it has known to the full. To lean once more on the great hall it knows is allowed, yet it is ashamed to have soiled the carved beam so long. It shuns the hawk and the falcon far, and throws itself to the sea islands, and it envies the mandarin ducks and the egrets at play in the river pools. In name and rank it stands only level with the yellow sparrow. Alone it yields the repaying of the ring, and the thought is not sweet.