Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 14
The Next Day, Matching the Rhymes of the Students at Their Summer Studies明日次夏課諸生韻
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 14 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.
此生此地幾廻來。無奈年年白髮催。我輩何嫌今老大。後生猶减舊遊陪。只緣惡雨傾河水。未向淸流送酒盃。倒載歸程唯似昔。依然落日隱城隈。
In this one life, how many times have I come back to this ground? What can be done, when year by year it hurries my hair to white? For us, now that we are old, what is there to dislike? Yet those who come after are fewer than the ones who attended the old outings. Only, because a fierce rain tipped over the Milky Way, we could not float our wine cups on the clear current. The road home, carried back head over heels, alone is as it used to be: as ever the setting sun hides behind the corner of the city wall.