Theodore Roethke의 Lost Son : 진전을 위한 퇴행 SLIPPING-BACK FOR PROGRESS

강방영 제주한라대학 1994 論文集 Vol.18 No.-

Theodore Roethke shows a faith that the roots of life can be found in nature. The primeval sources of being lie embedded eternally in nature, and he seeks vision of the rootedness of human beings in the natural world through his poems. His childhood in the family greenhouse provides a feeling of the oneness of the universe, everything that lives is holy, and profound inner union with the integrating principle of the universe. These powerful experiences repeat themselves throughout his life. Whenever he needs he goes back to his past and greenhouse, attains opportunities for discoveries of the mysterious quality of life force. In this study I deal with fifteen poems from his second collection The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) . Some greenhouse poems concern plant and work of men. And Lost Son sequence and other poems are about evolution of the self, individual's birth and growth, and its attainment of a maturity and independence. The process of a plant struggling to grow seems, for the poet, like human efforts to overcome adolescent conflicts and to come out into a new harmonious relationship with the world. Through plants the lost son understands what he is and finds his place in the world. And the poet is engaged in the struggle to reestablish the earlier time, not as an escape from reality or a step toward the return to undifferentiated chaos, but as a positive state that causes him to be affirmed and developed. Slipping-back to his past expeirence he recovers his sense of being, his source of integrity and inner harmony. Roethke seeks "ingathering", the process of realizing a potential that was then present but can now be brought to life. After the dark way to the past is traveled, he discovers joy of the adult and comes back to the present reality. This is, for Roethke, a going-forward and a way of achieving a spiritual progress. This reality is filled with light and communion and the poet can affirm his present existence because of the knowledge of the darkness that is also part of his identity. The affirmation of the nature does not deny the darkness, the terror of reality, but through it the poet finds in that reality joy and unity. The poet's affirmation is filled with things of the natural world and with human participation with them. In the moment of stillness and fullness in which life is shared in al its abundance, life has about it a wholeness.

사포(Sappho) 시의 자연 Imagery

강방영 제주한라대학 1999 論文集 Vol.23 No.-

Sappho(circa 625 B.C.) enjoyed fame and was honored in ancient times. There were perhaps nine complete volumes of her poetry, but her work was lost. Late in the 19th century manuscripts were discovered in the Nile Valley. Some of these manuscripts proved to contained Sappho's work. Many translations of these fragments are available today, offering a different approach to her work. The fragmental nature of the material, reconstructing a poem the translator must trail off into oblivion periodically, or speculate on the missing pieces and take the risk of introducing elements that Sappho did not intend. So to read multiple translations is good to obtain several view points. In this survey of Sappho' s some 30 poems translated in English, I tried to present Sappho's natural imagery in her poems. She portraits many kinds of human feelings with natural imagery. For example, love is a wind which has irresistible power that effects a change to an individual and enforces obedience. And love is venom that strikes one down. At the same time love is the warm light which gives beauty and meaning to life. Beautiful girl is like the full moon rising after sundown erasing all stars around it. And girls also with flowers represent something essential in our life. Her work of creating songs and poems is like that of a cricket and a nightingale. Endless time and repeated life in natural world is considered by the motions of stars and morning light. As we read Sapho's poems taking notice of her natural imagery we can understand her poem more deeply. And we can track her feelings about 2500 years later.

뢰트케 시에 나타난 노년의 현시

강방영 한국현대영미시학회 2004 현대영미시연구 Vol.10 No.1

Bang-Young Kang

하얀 절망의 양식 : Emily Dickinson의 연시 Emily Dickinson's Love Poems

강방영 제주한라대학 1996 論文集 Vol.20 No.-

Emily Dickinson realized that "To renounce is to possess the more." It also becomes her strategy as a poet. Her desire to possess everything made her look for the new value by which she could find a spiritual home. This home is a Heaven for Dickinson, and it is not heaven in the sense of religion, but that of her own subjectivity. This thesis is an examination of Dickinson's love poems. Some of her love poems deal with intense sexual pleasure describing the intimate act of love. The man and woman in these poems desire the security in each other's arms, the safe harbor of sexual embrace. The poems are like a New Testament of passion and devotion. Dickinson says that; "The sweet Heresy received/ That Man and Woman know―/ Each other's convert―/ Though the Faith accomodate but Tow―"(#387), "Love is like Life―merely longer/ Love is like Death, during the Grave/ Love is the Fellow of the Ressurection ... (#491) ... Sometimes love is awakening from childhood, ordinary Heaven of husband and home, and sometimes love is a festive marriage ceremony after death. The lovers come together after death, the Judgement Day, here God takes up His role as the master of Ceremonies, entirely obscured by the glory of the lovers. And in some poems the beloved is identified with a husband figure. Given her choice, the speaker would elect a life in which marriage gives passion a permanent home. Through several sensuous, emotional, psychological reactions of the lovers in her poems, Dickinson creates her heaven of yearning toward love, desire and attraction of the sexual pleasure. Love is a way of getting to Eden on Earth, getting eternity in this life. Dickinson also deals with a deep frustration and the feeling of loss, and her love poems gradually move to choose renunciation as a strategy for love. For the spiritual union with beloved, the woman in the love poems chooses to part, thinking it is only the possible way of keeping their love. These process shows how much can passion have a deep influence on human spirit. It also tells that Dickinson chooses art rather than relations with peole, longing for an immortal voice through powerful poems.

Roethke 시에 나타나는 삶의 질서와 생명의 원칙

강방영 제주한라대학 1993 論文集 Vol.17 No.-

Many poems of Theodore Roethke show a faith that the roots of life can be found in nature. He believes that the primeval sources of being lie embedded eternally in nature and we can rediscover them through true relationship with nature. To live to the fullest, to break through a more intense and nobler life human beings have to maintain a feeling of the onesess of the universe, profound inner union with the integrating principle of the universe. We once had it when we were children. Childhood is the matrix of man wherein lie the sense of being, his source of integrity and inner harmony, his identity with mankind. The adult has lost unity and joy of the childhood, but can restore them through tenderness and love. The purpose of this study is to have a comprehensive view of his poetry through the human relationship with nature. I deal with about thirteen poems from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1975). Evolution of the self, individual's growth, and its attainment of marurity and independence are connected with poems of sexual initation and love. These are the process of the self struggling to grow, to overcome adolescent conflicts and to come out into a new harmonious relationship with the world, and finding one's place in the world. And these poems show love is the integrating principle of the universe. Love gives meaning to the world, pervades the world, fulfills the supreme achievement of mystic insight. With love an adult can return to his original self and recover true energy of life, joy. Through love one can sense the absolute life and the absurdity of fear of death. Man becomes and participates eternally in a circularity in the life of the narural world with its cycles of decay and renewal. By experiencing love man goes through a developing stage of restoring and discovering life principle in the natural world and can share fulfilled moments of living.

애밀리 디킨슨(Emily Dickinson)

강방영(Kang, Bang-young) 미래영어영문학회 1997 영어영문학 Vol.- No.6

뢰트케의 자연이미저리와 불멸의 정적

강방영 ( Kang Bang-young ) 대한영어영문학회 2007 영어영문학연구 Vol.33 No.2

The purpose of this paper is to get a view of Roethke’s poetry in terms of the nature imagery and imperishable quiet at the heart of life. In his poems he expresses awareness of the mystery of being and his belief that the pristine source of life can be found in nature. He believes that we can experience a profound inner union with the integrating principle of the universe through natural things. He tries to discover mysterious quality of life force observing plants struggling to grow, thinking about human efforts to overcome conflicts and a new harmonious relationship with the world. He examines the inevitability of leaving this world and meaning of death. Through death man participates in a circularity of the natural world, the eternal cycles of decay and renewal. He moves toward the fulfilled moments of living through nature imagery and finds a way of achieving spiritual progress. Through meditation and memory of experiences in nature, he pursues ‘the final man’ as the end of things and accepts death as a door open to a new life. With his poems we can learn the loss of the purely human ego to the center of universe lies a way to the true life. (Cheju Halla College)

Sappho의 시에 나타나는 사랑의 의미

강방영(Kang Bang Young) 미래영어영문학회 1999 영어영문학 Vol.- No.7

뢰트키 시에 나타나는 아버지의 상징적 의미

강방영 ( Kang Bang-young ) 대한영어영문학회 2010 영어영문학연구 Vol.36 No.2

Roethke’s childhood was spent in his father’s greenhouse. His horticulturist father, who was the center of his childhood world, died when the poet was a teenager. Still living on in his son’s memory, Roethke’s father exerts complicated influences on the poet’s life and work. First of all, his father is a symbol of strength and wisdom. Contacting and converging with natural energy, his father gives life to his son and his plants. For them, his father is a source of love and security. The father controls the atmosphere of his son’s life like the temperature of the greenhouse. He establishes order in the greenhouse and the young poet follows it like all the plants there. However, the adolescent poet has a sense of inferiority because of his father, and his early death gives the poet a feeling of fear and a guilty conscience. The poet doesn’t think that he can live up to his father’s expectations, and after his father’s early death he feels like a lost son, alone and outside of his childhood paradise. His father is alive in the poet’s memory; sometimes he is angry with him, but sometimes he guides him out of the dark and cold world to meet the light and ordered world. In his later poems, God replaces his father, but has all the same characteristics of the poet’s father, giving love and anger. The poet goes back to his father’s greenhouse when he feels lost and weak, and the past world of his father serves as a background for sudden mystical enlightenment. His father’s greenhouse is a world of lost paradise which still exists somewhere; the poet misses and hopes to find it again. The poet’s complicated relationship with his father and its symbolic meaning are important factors in his poems. (Cheju Halla College)

뢰트케 시에서 자연과 자아

강방영 ( Kang Bang-young ) 대한영어영문학회 2009 영어영문학연구 Vol.35 No.2

In his poems, Roethke describes the relationship between nature and man. Focusing on natural energy, he shows us the organic processes of nature and urges the reader to feel a similar process within human consciousness. His descriptions of the seasons and scenery of the natural world parallel changes within the human mind and reveal a new meaning of life. Searching for a hidden reality brought forth by nature in mystical moments, he believes that nature is as physical and spiritual as a human being. He thinks that the human self evolves when it touches the source of the life force in nature. Roethke’s poems deal with the natural energy of the sun and indicate that the same power is locked up in the human body. He believes, so to speak, that rivers run in our veins and that the sea is our eternal home. He shows us that human life is a part of nature, and that nature teaches us what we need to know. The poet waits and prepares himself to receive the sudden mystical spirit that comes and wakes him. He believes that there is an immense growth of the self when it gains a feeling of ‘oneness’ with nature. Entering the center of universal life and joining its cycle, the self becomes all and eternal. Roethke’s poems place the natural world within our consciousness, accompanied by a kind of enlightenment. (Cheju Halla College)