Composed on Leaving the District, Shown to the Guests Who Saw Me Off發州有作。示餞客。
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 · 80 Chinese characters · reading time 0.8 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 15 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.
When the governor first came,
the village elders lined the roadside,
and among them the wives and the girls
put their heads side by side and peered over the fence.
It was not that they meanly wanted a look at my face,
but that they hoped to receive kindness and love.
If I had come to the district and been harsh and cruel,
they would have wished to wash those eyes of theirs out.
Now that my rule has had nothing worth seeing in it,
I am afraid, in leaving, of the business of the brick in the bosom.
Why then do you still stand in the way
as though you would lie down in front of the cartwheels?
Go well, and do not follow me far:
my going is swift as a running stream.
That district of yours truly tormented me,
and two years there were like a hundred.