• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.47-63
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• 2001

"A Variation of Love" is a characteristic Kim Soo-Young poem, in that it embodies the poet′s innovative use of language and proceeds speedily, like many of his other poems. Above all, the poem reveals the core of Kim′s poetical spirit, his speculation about love. The poem is difficult to understand because it broadly uses run-on lines and even run-on stanzas, a technique that many readers are unfamiliar with. The semiological approach of this paper will bring new light on the poem by restructuring the relationship between signs, that is, by taking apart the sign system of the original text and reconstructing its sentence structure. If we rearrange the poem from its original six stanzas and fifty-one lines to four stanzas and twenty-three lines, we will discover a close connection between stanzas 1 and 2, and between stanzas 3 and 4. Of the many keywords of the poem, we may establish the dominant word as "love," into which every poetic word converges and from which each word emanates. Another important keyword is "fatigue of the city" in stanza 4. Similarly negative aspects of the city may be found in the line "the same may be said of Bombay, of New York, of Seoul" in stanza 3, as well as in the words "desire" in combination with "the lamplights of Seoul like leftovers in the pig sty" in stanza 1. The persona of the poem tries to overcome the "fatigue of the city" by "love," but the way he realizes love is, somewhat peculiarly, through stillness and silence. The persona aligns "the stones of the peach and the apricot and the dried persimmon" with the his faith in love. He calls the stones "beautiful hardness" presumably because that hardness (the stillness and silence) may blossom into beauty. In the earlier stanzas, the persona′s quest for love results in an awareness that love is omnipresent, but the persona determines "not to shout it out loud." The reason for this determination is found in stanza 4. Those who experience the "fatigue of the city" will be able to realize it by themselves. This seemingly defeatist conclusion by no means suggest pessimism, for the persona holds the conviction that "there will come a day when [one] will rave for love." This conviction rescues the poem from the dismal mood suggested by the "fatigue of the city." At all events, it is important to note that the "fatigue of the city" should not be considered apart from "love." Yet, strangely enough, the poem embodies a severe critique of the city, and further investigation is necessary in order to clarify why this critique appears in the form of "love." But this will be the treated in another paper.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.31
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• pp.95-118
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• 2013

Robert Frost's poetry has generally been considered fairly readable partly because of the simplicity or down-to-earth-ness of the messages that go along with the poet's projected public image and the 'traditional' forms he used. Against the grain of such general perception, this study reads some of the early poems of Robert Frost to re-characterize the beginning of the poet's career as a modernist attempt to challenge the dominant poetic conventions of the time: the genteel conventions. In reading the poems, this study focuses on frost's strategic method of using the speaker or persona regarding the delivery of meanings. Those readers who would like to find the immediate presence of Frost's voice in the poems, fail to distinguish the speaker and the poet, readily accepting the face value of what the speaker tries to convey: those messages which are in line with liberal individualism, like self-reliance, autonomous self, work ethics, etc. Frost's speakers, however, are rarely the mouthpiece of the poet himself. Rather, they are fictional characters who, while on the surface of the text appear to be hammering out a stable theme out of their everyday experience, under a heuristic scrutiny of the textual structure, turn out to be undermining the logic or the rationality of the theme, which can be identified as a modernist textual strategy that challenges the traditional conventions regarding the stability of meaning in a poetic text.

• Sijohaknonchong
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• v.26
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• pp.7-24
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• 2007

The poetic world of Jeong Wan-yeong, Baeksu in pen name, is commonly said to be a mirror of the Oriental world of thoughts. However we haven't had any scientific article to support this point. My research is aimed to verify this point. The conclusions of my research are as follows : First, each persona in his sijo work complies to nature, revealing himself in harmony with the principles of nature, and lost in nature. Second. Baeksu, in his sijo works, regards two conflicting ideas as complementary ones, which was called the theory of 'Bangsaeng(方生)' by Chung-tze(莊子), and was called the theory of Origin(緣起說) by Buddhist philosophers. Third, Baeksu located his home town in a space of the supernatural world. which is similar to that of 'Muhayujihyang(無何有之鄕)'called by Chung-tze. From these points, it can be said that the ideas of Chung-tze and Buddhist philosophers are deeply permeated in his sijo works.