earticle

영어

The group of the Imagists in the early decades of the twentieth century advocated the poetics that stressed the importance of objectivity, exactness, and conciseness of expression in poetry. This tendency resulted in a kind of short poems putting emphasis mainly on visual effects, which seemed to be too superficial to portray the emotions laid deep in human psyche. Some of Pound’s Imagist poems, however, depict emotions from bereavement, separation, and suffering caused by man’s mortality. This paper proposes to analyze two contrasting poems of Ezra Pound, “April” and “Liu Ch’e” which deal with the theme of death. Both poems exemplify a structure typical of Imagist poems: the juxtaposition of a concrete description and a laconic line of metaphorical interpretation. The first of these poems describes the dismemberment of king Pentheus by the Dionysian maenads for opposing Dionysos. The poem does not utter any sorrow for the death but attains a reconciliation by suggesting the cosmic order governing the nature. Whereas this poem deals with the communal death of a Western mythical figure, the second poem “Liu Ch’e” deals with the actual death in a private world of Eastern history. Pound transformed the poem from Giles’ translation into a totally new kind of Imagist poem. The last line in Pound’s adaptation effectively communicates the emperor’s sorrow by presenting a concrete and metaphorical image.