Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 18
On the Ninth Day of the Seventh Month, on Night Duty at the Inner Chancellery, Written on the Wall七月九日。直內省書壁上。
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 18 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.
1The First
項強啄硬同遊輩。未入黃扉者亦多。此足此身登此地。有時慵直意如何。
Among the company I roamed with, stiff of neck and hard of beak, there are many besides who never entered the Yellow Door (黃扉). Having climbed to this seat with these feet and this body, what is the meaning of my being slack at night duty from time to time?
Interlinear notes 1
連臥病故爾
It was because I lay ill one time after another.
2The Second
桑楡景迫鬢渾噃。無德無功竊祿多。咫尺嚴城門外客。亦聞更盡尙行何。
The sun caught in the mulberry and elm draws near, and my sidelocks have all turned white. With neither virtue nor merit, only the salary I have stolen is much. Even the traveler outside the gate of the stern wall a step away hears, till the night is spent, the sound of someone still going about.