ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper explores the context in which the love poem “Toward my Bedchamber”(1923.9) by Yi Sang-hwa(1901-1943) is compared to Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress”(1681) and Charles Baudelaire’s “À une Madone”(1857). Song Uk and Kim Chun-su once claimed that “Toward my Bedchamber” merely imitates a English metaphysical poem, “To his Coy Mistress.” Their argument assumes the great influence upon Modern Korean literature by T. S. Eliot and his New Criticism. On the other hand, Cho Young-bok and Kim Hak-dong applied analytical positivism and broadened the scope of textual interpretation by comparing it with Baudelaire’s “À une Madone.” Both comparative approaches based on New Criticism and the positivist hermeneutics, respectively, can contribute to the better understanding of Yi Sang-hwa’s “Toward my Bedchamber” within comparative and world literature studies. This paper provides a common ground to compare “Toward my Bedchamber” with these two Western poems. The poet Yi Sanghwa’s life is related to ‘an old woman’ of family, while his poetic speaker intends to fall in love with ‘a new woman’ as shown in “Toward my Bedchamber.” It can be seen as a poem containing the self-splitting of a poetic speaker who pursue the true love with a new woman by committing suicide together but could not give up his life in the end. “Toward my Bedchamber” is comparable in which a poem that shows the dynamics of self-splitting like the poetic speaker from “To his Coy Mistress” and “À une Madone.” The self-splitting of the speaker in “Toward my Bedchamber” is also connected to the mind of the poetic speaker in his later poem, “Will Spring Return to Stolen Fields” (1926.6).

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