My Eye Ailment Long Unhealed, and Being Told There Is a White Film at the Edge of the Pupil, I Sigh and Write This眼病久不理。人云瞳邊有白膜。因嘆之有題。
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 · 110 Chinese characters · reading time 1 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 9 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.
My eyes were as bright as the bright moon,
and on the whole there were few to match me,
but a film has formed in the pupil instead
and screens it a little, as though a cloud were drawn around it.
The physician says that unless it be dragon's brain (龍腦),
this ailment will not be cured in the end.
Seeking it here and there and not getting it,
I fretted over it for some days,
and then suddenly got it from a noble house
and, holding it in my hand, laughed at first for joy.
The physician says that this is not the true thing,
but only something like it in appearance.
Is it hard to cure after all?
Even the moon is eaten away and then grows bright again,
but the moon is a numinous thing,
so how is it to be compared with me?
I shall likely end like Clerk Xi (習注簿),
and be in this state until the day I die.
If Heaven should in the end not cast me off,
perhaps it will give me back the bright eyes of old.
I only cry out sorrowfully and pray to Heaven;
medicine and needles are not what I look to.