On the Double Ninth, My Hand Being Ill, I Could Not Go Out to Roam重九日。旣以手病未出遊。
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 · 112 Chinese characters · reading time 1.2 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 7 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.
Last year, when I met the Double Ninth at Sangju,
I lay long sunk in illness and could not drink.
I forced myself up on a goosefoot staff to go and find a monk,
and rubbed the cold fragrance in my hand, doing nothing but smell it.
Last year is gone already, I said, let me not chase it with regret,
and I waited instead for this year to hold a fine gathering.
How was I to know that this year my hand would ail again,
so that I could not keep up with the poem-and-wine crowd at their fine doings?
Even so I get up and drink once more and chew the frost-touched petals;
my failure to be rid of the common world comes to just this much.
My mountain wife laughs and presses me, and that is joy enough —
why must one climb some height and be dead drunk?
That a scholar's lot is thin is not worth speaking of:
year after year I pass the fine season in sickness.
In the setting sun I chant in sorrow and circle the chrysanthemum fence,
while the west wind, faithful as ever, still blows my cap away.
Interlinear notes 1
予南行集。有重九訪資福堂頭詩。
In my Collection of the Southern Journey (南行集) there is a poem on visiting the head of Jabok Monastery at the Double Ninth.