Receiving my stipend on the seventh day of the first month正月七日受祿
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 · 100 Chinese characters · reading time 1 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 2 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.
In days past, when I held a chancellor's seat
I feared I might upset the food in the cauldron
All my life without so much as a sliver of merit
How many bushels of stipend did I take year after year
With my mouth I wasted the fat of the ten thousand people
And my body lay prone again in a single room
Still the king did not cast off a man of the old days
And grants me jade-like rice pounded a thousand times
Even half a stipend is of itself enough
A wren is content with a few grains
I say to my old wife
Do not look on it with the eyes of former days
Do not dare spend lightly
And keep your hands folded always toward heaven
If my remaining breath should somehow hold
It may even go on, year after year
Measure everything by what there is and is not
And pray do not fret over mouth and belly
Only one sorrow is left me
That I cannot keep the green wine coming in the jar
Interlinear notes 1
手必向天束 — Some read this as telling one to spend sparingly, as though the hands were bound. — translator