Memento Mori aspects in Gi, Hyung-do's Poetry

This paper is to view various poetic thinking about deaths in Gi, Hyung-do's poetry from the point of view of memento mori. The aspects of memento mori displayed in his poetry can be largely understood as 'regret' of death or self-contempt, the popularization of death, and affirmation of death derived from the meaning process of 'great solitary'. In the 'regret' of death or memento mori of the sound, poetic spaces that Gi recalls are accompanied by childhood trauma of death. The trauma of the death of poetic speaker forms is the variation of diverse sounds in the extension of fear and loneliness. This, by equating that the sound itself is death, acts as the standard of various interpretations in regards to death in Gi's poetry. The emotion of self-contempt and popularization of death are derived from the combination of urban spaces and capitalistic natures. The emotion of self-contempt of the poetic speaker obtained from his father is both the common idea of a whole social community and self-reproach of the individual who belongs to that reality. The complex feelings of self-contempt transform Gi's life as well as the emotion of the poetic speaker embedded in the text into passivity, rendering them to hate themselves or to reify only to head towards the death. Gi, through the poetic recognition of 'great solitary', secures the dominance over the death. In this process, he enlarges the meanings of the affirmation of death by incorporating the text. By reviving the devastation of the death experienced from his childhood as a double meaning in the spaces of the text symbolized as 'empty house', ultimately affirming the death beyond death. As a result, Gi poetically embodies the anxiety and fear of various deaths he experienced and reasoned by means of memento mori.