Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 8

With Elder Mun and the Scholar Choe Seunggyu, Each of Us Composing on an Old Poet's Rhymes同文長老方崔秀才升圭。用古人韻各賦。

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 · 56 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 min

Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former 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.

蟻坑名官奈爲何。一世生涯付醉歌。詞格淸哀珠有淚。道心虛寂井無波。禪公旅寓窠依鳥。園客仙期繭作蛾。綠髮相逢須痛飮。他年重見鬂霜多。

What is to be made of famed office in an ant-hole? I entrust a whole life's course to drunken song. The style of his writing is clear and sad: there are tears in the pearl; his mind for the Way is void and still: there is no wave in the well. The Zen master lodges as a traveller, a nest where a bird has settled; for the Garden Guest (園客), by an immortal's appointment, the cocoon becomes a moth. We have met while our hair is black: drink deep, then, by all means. When we see each other again in days to come, the frost on our temples will be thick.