Matching the Rhymes of Vice Minister Yi Su's Further Reply to My Poem of a Stifled Heart次韻李侍郞需復和鬱懷詩
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 · 76 Chinese characters · reading time 0.7 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 10 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 body is old and sickness strikes again
What can be done with the stifling sunk in my breast
What from time to time much consoles me
Is only the thing within the cup
Yet even that falls short of opening me out wide
Only this one brush at my fingertips runs across heaven and earth as a fine horse leaps
I look at your poem
And it pierces the sky, and the moon rises besides
The one who raises me up is just yourself
Cast you off, and who else would lead me again
My whole life, one thing and another, is furnished with the true
This old man has shrunk like a frozen turtle
Yet within there is that which is hard to bend
Interlinear notes 1
捨君誰復導我平生一一皆具實 — These are lines of uneven length without punctuation. Joined into one line, they are also read as 「you alone are the one to lead my whole life and furnish it, one thing and another, with the true.」 — Translator