Love, I should wake up,
Thy warmth touching my body this moment,
I should raise my spine like the dawn-wakened
sea,
Like the fledgeling eagle, should flutter my
wings,
Like the surprised tiger, should crouch my
whole body,
Like the surprised python, should raise up my
head.
Love, how thy eyes disturb my mind!
Love, how thy words enkindle my soul!
Religious enlightenment is a theme fre-
quently treated by mature poets. However, it is
liable to be expressed in abstract or pedantic
terms. But Pak Tu-jin bypasses such liability by
characteristically resorting to the natural sym-
bolism of the sun, the moon, the tiger, etc. He
retains the Isaiah-like vision of his early days,
though chastened through the years of suffering.
Pak Tu-jin’s culminating achievement as
poet in recent years was the discovery of a wholly
new world of poetic images and themes. As
ardent lover of nature, he climbs mountains
and strolls along rivers whenever he finds time
to spare. In the early 1970’s he started collecting
stones of strange shapes on river-sides. His
visionary power was fired in a way he had
never experienced before when he looked at the
suggestive shapes and colors of the stones, which
were eroded, chiselled, and smoothed ever so
slowly by the flowing water for thousands, per-
haps millions, of years. The result isThe Biogra-
phies of the Water Stones,a series of sequential
poems collected in two volumes (1973;1976).
The ‘‘biographies’’ are still being written, and
Pak Tu-jin is still strolling along rivers in search
of stones with ‘‘biography.’’ His small garden
and all the rooms of his house are packed with
the stones, each of which can inspire him with a
poem of wonderful images and themes. In his
home they take the place traditionally given to
ceramic pieces, old paintings, scrolls of calligra-
phy, rare books and other human artefacts cher-
ished and treasured by the scholar or the artist.
The stone has always been one of Pak Tu-
jin’s central images, as we have seen in ‘‘The
Stone Monument.’’ The English critic Coleridge
said that imagination is the power of mind by
which one sees human and natural figures in the
strange shapes formed on the frozen window
panes. Practically every person who sees such
frozen shapes can exercise such imagination,
but very rare are those who can ‘‘see’’ in the
stones such symbolic images as ‘‘Waves at the
Genesis,’’ ‘‘The Reunion of the Dragons,’’
‘‘The Scar,’’ ‘‘The Cliff with Reasons,’’ etc.
These are the products of a unique visionary
power, strangely reminding us of modern expres-
sionist and abstract art; for example, the works
of Max Ernst, who ‘‘saw’’ such strange figures in
the texture of the old wooden floor, worn bare
by many decades of continuous scrubbing, as
‘‘battle ending in a kiss,’’ ‘‘rock, sea, and rain,’’
‘‘earth tremors,’’ ‘‘sphinx in the stable,’’ etc.
However, in contrast to expressionists Pak Tu-
jin does not indulge in radical discontinuity of
logic or in ‘‘systematic disruption of meaning.’’
His images are arranged in well-ordered compo-
sitions. ‘‘The Scar’’ is a fair example:
Your blue scar was torn deep by water after
water,
Your first shame of pain still not healed,
You bury your face in your ten fingers from
the sun,
You turn around and hide your eyes from the
moon,
Long after the loss of your youthful eyes
You still shed tears touching your blue scar.
The poet is looking at a black stone with a blue
groove on it. It may look like a river, a ravine, and
many other things to other people. But to the poet,
it is a ‘‘scar’’ of shame in the body of the innocent-
looking stone. Obviously it is a symbol of Original
Sin by which man is shamed and humbled, but
which at the same time puts into man the longing
for the prelapsarian state. Such longing and shame
make man lovable and truly human. ‘‘A deep sor-
row humanized my soul,’’ writes a poet.
Although the stones are very particular
objects, Pak Tu-jin seldom becomes whimsically
personal or incommunicably idiosyncratic. On
rare occasions, however, he seems to be trying to
make out that the stones have been slowly form-
ing themselves into meaningful shapes expressly
for him to discover at the destined moment and
place. This is of course an instance of ‘‘pathetic
fallacy,’’ in which he does not seriously indulge.
On the whole, he looks for the universal meaning
of the image he ‘‘sees’’ in a stone. Or to put it in
another way, the image provides him with an
appropriate ‘‘objective correlative’’ to the mean-
ing he has in his inner self. Readers, who can never
imagine what the poet is referring to, can share the
shock, the sudden joy, of discovering the image
and its charged meaning.River of August