Three Songs of the Thatched Hall — The Plain Screen草堂三詠 素屛
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 · 90 Chinese characters · reading time 0.9 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 3 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.
Look, you, at the houses of the five great lords:
their gold props up the Northern Dipper.
On walls and partitions the painted colors shine,
and earth and timber are clothed in brocade.
All round where they sit they set up screens of every treasure,
and immortals and spirits go rushing at one another there.
Why should they fear the cold of the ice valley?
They boast only of the plenty of the copper mountain.
In a hundred years they go back to the hill slope,
and all alike are the earth of one mound.
I have a single plain screen,
and I spread it for a friend before my bed.
The white moon shines on my face,
white clouds come down upon my head.
I turn it over in my mind: between heaven and earth
this body too is a thing received on loan.
Seek the real, and in the end there is no real:
not one thing is my own.