face washed clear is that of a child. Usually a
Korean mother washes her young children’s
faces and hands in the morning. It is almost a
ritual. Pak is obviously thinking of such a child’s
face. The adjectivego-un,translated as ‘‘hand-
some,’’ is usually about young women, children
and flowers and not about grown-up men. In
Pak’s vision the sun is the handsome face of a
child washed clean in the morning by his loving
mother. Such a vision of the sun is entirely new
to Korean readers, and it will be quite refreshing
also to Westerners. John Donne’s irreverent
‘‘Busy old fool, thou unruly sun’’ is shocking
and remains only such, but Pak’s child-like sun
remains refreshing.
But Pak’s sun is not only handsome and
child-looking, it is also anenfant terriblewho
has god-like powers. It is the child-like sun who
has consumed the darkness over innumerable
hills all through the night and is glowing like
fresh coal fire. At first glance, the child’s clean
washed face contradicts the darkness-consuming
glowing face, but Pak envisions the unity of the
contraries: something infinitely innocent and at
the same time all powerful, like the miracle of the
Christ-child or the Little Lamb. Darkness is the
enemy of light. Light drives away darkness. But
Pak’s light has to be more than simple light: it
has to be innocent and handsome as well as
powerful.
‘‘The green mountains with their green
wings flapping.’’ The green mountains are com-
pared to so many gigantic green birds. Or, the
green mountains are full of wing-flapping birds.
Both senses operate in the metaphor, adding
greatly to the mythical atmosphere of the poem.
The world where the sun is a handsome
Korean child’s face, not Apollo’s or Hyperion’s,
naturally becomes a fairy-tale Eden. The poet
becomes a child in this Eden where he can play
with the deer and the tiger. In Korean folk-tales
deer and tigers are familiar characters, but a child
even in its pristine innocence rarely meets and
plays with a tiger. Obviously Pak’s treatment of
the theme is a retelling of Isaiah’s vision in a
Korean setting:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the
leopard shall lie down with the kid; and calf
and the young lion shall eat straw like the ox.
And the sucking child shall play on the hole of
the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand
on the cockatrice den. (Isaiah xi, 6–8)Isaiah’s prophetic vision is of a world where
all creatures are living in innocent harmony,
with emphasis on the infancy of the creatures.
It is not a simple day-dreaming or wishful think-
ing; it is a proclamation about a historical future
that should come. In the same spirit Pak says, ‘‘If
I meet you face to face, not just in my dreaming,
we shall rejoice together in that fresh day of
innocent beauty.’’ He is not simply dreaming,
but eagerly looks forward to the indefinite his-
torical future when all creatures ‘‘shall not hurt
nor destroy in all [God’s] holy mountain: for the
earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord,
as the waters cover sea.’’ (Isaiah, xi, 9).
As a Korean of that time, he was certainly
longing for the day of national liberation from
the foreign rule, but such longing was shared by
all Koreans. As a true poet he had also the
prophetic vision of the ultimate liberation of
man in the Christian sense. In this he was follow-
ing Isaiah who had the ultimate vision of man’s
redemption while longing for the salvation of his
own people.
Pak Tu-jin was prohibited from publishing
poems in the Korean language soon after he had
discovered a world of poetry new in conception
and style. He is known to have participated in
underground resistance activities, but when
finally liberation came he wrote few poems
worth remembering for their vivid preservation
of the great emotional empact of the occasion.
He was not a recorder of historical facts. Liber-
ation entailed the tragic division of the nation
and consequent disillusionment. But our pro-
phetic poet seems to have found it meaningless
to write occasional verse on every social happen-
ing of those days. For that matter, few other
poets wrote memorable poetry about those
eventful days.
Pak Tu-jin was meanwhile refining his dic-
tion and enriching the world of his images.
During the Korean War, he took refuge in a
southern city, but he was virtually silent about
the national disaster. Only a few lyrics for
patriotic songs written at the request of the
government survive in song books. (He has
written many occasional poems commissioned
by social organizations, few of which are col-
lected in his volumes of poetry.) Instead, he
kept his characteristic dignity as a visionary
poet. ‘‘The Stone Monument’’ was written dur-
ing his refuge days.River of August