Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 9
Matching the Rhymes of a Poem Sent by a Friend in Jiangnan次韻江南友人見寄
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former 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.
流景環廻幾小還。舊遊渾似夢魂閒。愁髯苒苒方黏雪。詩骨巉巉漸聳山。岫爲窓開呈遠碧。苔因門杜長新斑。無官尙爾歸田晚。未死何時得暫閑。
The streaming light turns and turns — how many small rounds has it come back? Our old roaming is all like a soul within a dream. My careworn whiskers, wavering, are just now sticking with snow, and my poem-making bones, craggy, rise ever more like mountains. The peaks, the window being open, offer up their distant blue, and the moss, thanks to the closed gate, grows new patches. Holding no office, I am yet late in returning to the fields; before I die, when shall I get even a moment's leisure?