Moved by the Dimming of My Eyes, Given to Jeon Iji眼昏有感。贈全履之。
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 · 150 Chinese characters · reading time 1.5 min
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.
I am now forty-four,
and both my eyes are already dim.
Even at a hand's breadth I cannot tell one man from another,
as though a thick spring mist lay between.
I asked the physician, and the physician said:
it is because your liver is not filled;
or else, when you were young,
you read your books in the shadow of a lamp.
I heard him and clapped my hands and laughed.
You are no physician.
When the ear has something it would hear
and cannot hear it, that is deafness;
when the eye has something it would see
and cannot see it, that is called blindness.
I would see the Son of Heaven,
but there is no way through the nine gates;
I would see the gold and purple (金紫),
but my hempen coat does not even cover my body;
I would see Yaohuang and Weizi,
but only common grasses grow rank in vain.
I have not seen living in a fine house,
and white-haired I lodge in a waste of mugwort;
I have not seen the food of five cauldrons,
and in Yan Hui's lane I am sated with being often empty.
It is for this that my eyes have grown dim,
as if covered over with coarse hemp cloth.
This too is what heaven has set upon me,
so why must it be treated with drugs and needles?
How do I know it may not turn out a blessing?
Deaf and blind, I may yet come whole to my end.