Sitting Alone in Sickness, Out of a Stifled Heart I Got a Poem in Long and Short Lines; Having Nowhere to Show It, I Gave It to Vice Minister Yi病中獨坐鬱懷。得長短句一首。無處寄示。因贈李侍郞。
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 · 78 Chinese characters · reading time 0.7 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 legs are weak and cannot walk
And the stifling in my heart has long been heaped up
And on top of that my eyes have gone dim
It is over with this old thing
This morning a thought rose in me of a sudden
I wished that two wings might sprout from this body and that I might fly up with all my strength, crossing heaven and earth and the four quarters
Below I would leap over rivers and seas
Above I would brush the sun and the moon
And yet how narrow is even this
Neither south nor north, with no that and no this — such is the true shape of the Way
You have long known my heart
Why then have I been thus broken and bent instead
Interlinear notes 1
摧屈 — Taking the one who is broken to be the Vice Minister Yi who receives this poem, it is also read as 「why then have you.」 Since the whole piece laments the writer's own legs and eyes, it has been taken as the writer himself. — Translator