—Let just one green bird fly forth from you,
Stone monument. Let just one long cry come
forth out of you.
You, sleeping for a thousand, two thousand,
three thousand years, let all your lichens sprout
and bloom as flowers. And when these flowers
flow like frost melting, the stars shall descend
from beyond the high heavens.
Stone monument, oh, stone.... What do you
breathe? If you gathered it all into one great
breath, could you not grow wings? Could you
not stretch forth a long neck like the crane and
soar beyond the clouds? Rainstorms, swirling
snows, the searing heat of the sun, and the
madly leaping seasons drive nails into you,
drive spikes.
Moonlight.... When the stars melt down making
it bright as a mirror, I shall come to you again. I
wish you could put out your hand and just once
clasp mine. I wander away leaving you alone on
the plain.
Although this poem is almost as often
anthologized as the foregoing one, the two
seem so different in conception and style that
many readers find it difficult to recognize them
as the works of the same poet. While ‘‘The Sun’’
has the atmosphere of a fairy-tale with the child-
like sun and the animals, ‘‘The Stone Monu-
ment’’ is an adult affair against the background
of inclement weather and night.
A lonely stone monument in the open field
with the inscription almost eroded away and
covered with black lichens is a familiar object
in Korea. It may look like waiting for someone
with infinite patience bearing a forgotten
message.
The poet has been wandering in the field
when he confronts the stone monument fixed in
the ground. Its centuries-long silence and immo-
bility drive the poet to burst into an impatient
ejaculation: ‘‘Let just one green bird fly forth
from you.’’ He is not simply curious about its
history or wishes it would move a little, yawn, or
groan as in a fairy-tale, but wants it to fly
instantly and make a bird’s cry. He wants an
instant transformation, a decisive, once-for-all
remaking of the object condemned to fixity and
silence all through the eventful history.
The ‘‘green bird’’ reminds us of ‘‘the green
mountains flapping their wings’’ in the foregoing
poem. A mountain is a big stone—a sort of
monument by God as many poets like to say.
The green that covers the mountains looks like
green feather to the poet. The man-made
monument with lichen covering its surface
resembles a mountain. But the lichens are black
and show little sign of life. But the God-made
monument is green and alive with birds’ flapping
wings.
Pak’s poetry abounds in the imagery of
flowers, especially of many blooming together
in the same place. If the dead-looking lichens on
the stone come alive with flowers overflowing it
like melting dew, there would be a correspond-
ing change in the universe: bright stars, the
fixed ‘‘flowers’’ of the high heavens, would
also flow down. There would be an apocalyptic
change in the world. This is another expression
of the poet’s ardent wish for a radical remaking
of the world.
Meanwhile, rainstorms, swirling snows, and
the searing beat of the sun erode the surface of the
stone which seems to be patiently waiting as if just
for the sake of waiting. The poet feels both impa-
tience and admiration for it. There is ground
enough to interpret the symbolism of the stone
monument as the long dormant national spirit of
the Korean people which needs sudden, decisive
awakening. This is the usual nationalistic reading
of the poem.
In the last part of the poem, the poet leaves
the monument making a promise that he will
come back on a miraculous night when the
moon is shining or a shooting star is lighting
the sky like a momentary mirror. He whimsically
wishes that the stone would then shake hands
with him like a human.
Such a miracle does not happen in this life.
But, Pak Tu-jin would say, the persistence of
waiting for such a miracle and the ardent wish
for it are meaningful and admirable as a mode of
existence.
‘‘The Fragrant Mountains,’’ also an early
poem, contains even more striking images of
the miracle. In the latter part of the poem, Pak
says:
Mountains, mountains, mountains! your silence
of millions of years seems to be wearisome
enough.
Mountains, may I hope for the blazing columns
of fire forcing themselves out from your soaring
peaks and lowly ridges?
May I continue to believe that the day when
foxes and wolves, forgetting the smell of blood,
run joyfully together with deer and rabbits in
search of the tender shoots of the bush clover
and the arrowroot?River of August