초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This study investigates the spatial imagination in Kim Jong-sam’s poems focused on his three poems among others, ‘Door Leafs,’ ‘Stone Wall,’ and ‘Lashanska.’ We think that the space in his poems is figured mainly in images of ‘house (door),’ and the door’s dual structure of openness and closedness, engaged with his psychological ambivalent feelings, is figured by unique spatial imagination. Kim’s spatial imagination is deeply related with his consciousness of the world and inner consciousness of sin. With the "half opened door leaf" expressed in ‘door leaf’ as an axis, the innerside of the house, as a kind of holy place, is identified with the paradise (heaven), the homeland of eternal rest, which he wants to eventually reach, and the outside of the door, as the real world where he lives, appears as a place of despair, where poverty, diseases, wars, and death exist. Kim Jong-sam hesitates between the openness and closedness of the door, i.e. between the holiness and the earthliness, which is a look of one who stands on a narthex. Kim’s consciousness of sin is deeply rooted in his inner side in that the place where he lives is a world full of sins though he intends toward the holy place, and it is difficult for him to enter the holy place as he is a sinner. The poet builds a house in the real world outside the door. The self-identity that he can represent in the real is the ‘poet’s’ life. Thus, he has tried to express his artistic self-awareness and architectural nature in the figurative way of ‘house building,’ the result of which is ‘stone walls.’ Ironically, the stone wall, however, is not the house of a living person, but is that of the death, and at the same time it is a house with the "emptied third," which will collapse soon. In ‘Stone Wall’ appears his desolate despair in which the poet cannot construct anything but those which will collapse in the end however artistic competence he exerts in the ruined ground of the real life. On the other hand, the deeper the despair of the existence and the world, the bigger his passionate desire for the holy place, which he recognizes as a place like mother’s breast and homeland. The poet’s consciousness of intention to the holy place well appears in his poem ‘Lashanska.’ The fact that deep attachment to temples, Christian churches, and holy music uniquely appears in his poems is a poetic realization of desire for the paradise as a place of consolidation and escape. Kim Jong-sam’s intention to the holy place has been the only consolidation and force with which he can live the painful real world. Thus it seems that his eagerness to dream of building a new house while despairing of the real, and endlessly yearn for the eternal world of paradise was the momentum that makes him bear the real. This was a way that the poem lives as a member of the post-war generation at that time, and Kim Jong-sam’s inner properties and his poems’ characteristics different from other poets’.
