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) Latter Collection, Book 8 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.
Three or four months lying ill,
and how many poems have I made?
The sound of groaning and the sound of chanting
mingled with each other and followed one another.
This habit too is a sickness,
hard to cure with medicine.
It seems self-invited and yet is not self-invited;
it seems chance and yet is not chance.
Though I pull up the quilt and would stop in silence,
the humming comes all at once to my lips.
Is it heaven, or is it a spirit?
Something seems to draw me on as its occasion.
Sometimes I would shift to some other business,
but drive as I may, my mind will not go forward.
Alas, in the end I cannot govern it,
and shall at last die of this.
Interlinear notes 1
予舊作詩。自傷詩癖猶不能止。復傷之。
I once made a poem grieving at my own addiction to poetry, and still could not stop; so I grieve again.