An
Sonjae / Brother Anthony
What
is the point of literature? In particular, does poetry have any real value,
does it really matter to anyone in today¡¯s world? Is it worth reading and, an
almost more important question, is it worth writing poetry in today¡¯s world?
Does the study of literature in the classroom make you want to become a writer,
and if not, why not? What are the poet¡¯s responsibilities? A lot of questions
to cover in a few minutes.
If you have read any part of Chaucer¡¯s Canterbury
Tales, I suppose it will have been the General Prologue. If you have
read it, you will remember that Chaucer starts by describing in some detail a
number of the pilgrims with whom he finds himself setting out on his pilgrimage
from London to Canterbury. They are mostly defined by the work they do—their
social role: Knight, Doctor, Miller, Lawyer, Cook, Sailor, and so on. Only a
very few are given individual names, they are mainly identified by their job.
The only woman among them who is not a religious nun is usually simply known as
¡°The Wife from Bath,¡± and she although since she has already outlived five
husbands, being a wife can also be considered her full-time job. The
descriptions feel ¡°realistic¡± to most readers because the people are described ¡°warts
and all¡± as the English say. They are mostly not ¡°mere stereotypes¡± and not
perfect role-models.
Quite early on, we begin to notice that we are
being given information suggesting that this or that pilgrim is a thief, a lecher,
a far from model example of a churchman, or even perhaps a murderer. Yet the
voice describing them never falters, never expresses any reticence or negative
judgement. The word used most often to qualify the pilgrims is ¡°worthy¡± – used
13 times! When it is used several times to qualify the knight, we are prepared
to accept that Chaucer is impressed by such a high-class professional fighter;
we are rather puzzled to find it used of the Friar just when we have learned
that he refuses to care for poor people and lepers. The word ¡°good¡± is also
kept busy, used for example to qualify the Shipman, a ¡°good fellow¡± who steals
his passengers¡¯ wine while they are asleep and throws pirates who attack him
into the sea, telling them to swim home. What makes Chaucer really modern is
the stress he puts on money-earning ability. His descriptions are all about the
capitalistic activities by which these individuals earn wealth, by fair means
or foul; this world is a dynamic and competitive one, like ours, and full of
opportunities to be dishonest.
By the end of the portraits, we have begun to
feel that Chaucer, the author of this human comedy, is offering his readers an
exam. Or perhaps a kind of quiz game: ¡°What is the value of a less-than-perfect
human being.¡± After all, the word ¡°worthy¡± contains the word ¡°worth¡± within it,
fairly obviously. By contrast, the Chaucer-figure who is telling the story of
the pilgrims seems not to be at all interested in pre-judging their relative
values, although he clearly knows that everybody does that. Rather, being of an
immensely kind-hearted disposition, he seems ready to admire and respond
positively to each person he meets, although there is a feeling of strained
sympathy, of gritted teeth, when he is trying to be kind about the Pardoner and
the Summoner who come at the end and seem particularly repulsive both
physically and morally.
A lot of students, and some of us teachers too,
tend to stop reading the General Prologue at the end of the portraits.
We rather skim over the rest, where Harry Bailly, the landlord (Host) of the
Tabard Inn where they have come together, expresses his admiration for the
pilgrims and decides to join them. We know that he is going to suggest a way of
having some fun along the road to Canterbury, suggesting a story-telling
contest as a way of avoiding boredom. Each pilgrim, he suggests, will tell four
stories, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. He, the jovial
though not highly-educated Host, will then be the judge of which of them has
told the ¡°best¡± tales, ¡°Tales of best sentence and moost solaas,¡± (798). That
pilgrim will be rewarded by a free supper at the end of the pilgrimage, paid
for by all the rest. Such contests were a familiar part of the activities of
literary groups in England and France, but there is obvious irony in the way
the highly-experienced author and literary figure Geoffrey Chaucer attributes
this initiative and the judging role to the very un-literary Harry Bailly,
presenting himself as a rather stupid, unimaginative guy who can do nothing
more than report what other people say and do.
Equally significant is the little word ¡°and¡±
between ¡°best sentence¡± and ¡°moost solaas.¡± Both these terms are unfamiliar in
modern English. ¡°Sentence¡± might be replaced by ¡°meaning¡± or ¡°content¡± or even ¡°significant
message¡± and ¡°solaas¡± by ¡°fun¡± or ¡°entertainment value.¡± Chaucer knows, and
expects his readers to know that since classical times there had been a tension
between the two obvious reasons for telling a story, or writing anything: to
teach or to entertain. In the 16th century, Sir Philip Sidney spoke
of the same topic in his Defence of Poesy as ¡°to
teach and delight,¡± pointing out that a text that gave no pleasure to the
reader would not be able to teach any lesson because no one would go on reading
it.
In Chaucer¡¯s General
Prologue, Harry Bailly informs the pilgrims that on their return he is
going to be the judge as to which has told the best tales, but he shows no
awareness of any need to decide first whether ¡°a good story¡± is one that
teaches the audience something serious about life, or one that makes them roar
with laughter. His ¡°and¡± too readily conflates instruction and pleasure.
Chaucer clearly expects his readers to notice this potential confusion, for one
of the most important features of the diversity of tales contained in his
unfinished collection, stressed by the often stormy exchanges between pilgrims
that precede and sometimes interrupt the tales, is the difference between a
tale told with a didactic intention regardless of the audience¡¯s wishes or
response, and one told with the goal of pleasing an audience at all costs.
I would like you to see
a connection between these two aspects of Chaucer¡¯s work. The portraits of the
individual pilgrims in the General Prologue often suggest imperfections,
sometimes serious moral failings, yet keep reminding us that we do not always
feel the strongest affection for the most perfect people. Chaucer is so
positive about everyone. Perhaps because our own humanity is also flawed, we are
easily taken in by and respond positively to people we know to be wretches,
rascals, or rogues. ¡°He¡¯s a good fellow!¡± and ¡°That was a good story!¡± come
together to indicate our usual unwillingness to think clearly enough about the
word ¡°good.¡± ¡°That¡¯s a good story / fellow because I like it / him / her.¡± In
the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the two
exclamations come together because we can often sense strongly that each
portrait is the condensation of an otherwise untold tale.
Chaucer was doing something
in writing those portraits that has perhaps never been bettered, his art is
amazing. Everyone notices a sense of ¡°realism¡± in the way each portrait follows
a different pattern. The pilgrims come alive in a way that has often been
considered to look forward to the much more recent novel. In reaction, in
recent decates scholars have talked about ¡°estates satire¡± and the ways in
which other medieval writers wrote to pinpoint failings and encourage reform in
the practice of social exchanges. This can be valuable, but . . . The way
Chaucer writes the portaits, you will know if you have read them, includes the
use of ¡°indirect reported speech.¡± At several points we seem to hear the voice
of the pilgrim talking, telling self-justifying tales about himself or herself.
In the Monk¡¯s portrait, we read lines in which he can be heard defending his
very un-monastic life-style: ¡°He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen, That seith
that hunters ben nat hooly men,¡± (177) and the sense of hearing his actual
words is only strengthened by echoes of Chaucer¡¯s response: ¡°And I seyde his
opinion was good.¡± (183). Often, the portraits are presented as if they
were based on the way each person has spoken of himself. Now there are very few
people who speak negatively of themselves to a sympathetic stranger; yet
through what people say, we may often get a picture other than the one they
want to give. A complete fool may reveal himself to us as such while believing
that he is displaying great wisdom. It is very important to practice
discernment while listening to the things people say about themselves. It may
sound very convincing and plausible; it may all be quite untrue.
This is the basis of what is often known as ¡°Lucianic
Satire¡± and the most important work in English literature inspired by that is
Book 2 of More¡¯s Utopia. Here, we have an intensely positive account of
life in Utopia. Generations of readers have done as More feared they would, and
assumed that they were expected by the author, the great Sir Thomas More, to
share the narrator¡¯s admiration, forgetting that the person speaking this
account is not Henry VIII¡¯s Lord High Chancellor and Catholic martyr-saint
Thomas More, but an uneducated though well-intentioned sailor, Raphael
Hythloday, whose given name may be that of a truth-telling archangel, his
family name means ¡°speaker of nonsense.¡± The companion work to More¡¯s Utopia,
Erasmus¡¯s Praise of Folly, works on much the same principle, with Folly
being not only the topic of the praise but also the speaker of it; both men had
taken delight in translating from the Greek works by the said Lucian, which
employ the same technique, that of the often unconsciously unreliable ¡°speaking¡±
narrator.
Chaucer, who surely had never heard of Lucian,
was to employ the same technique in his two great ¡°dramatic monologues,¡± the Wife
of Bath¡¯s Prologue and the Pardoner¡¯s Prologue. The idea for those
extended ¡®self-tales¡¯ is an obvious extension of what begins in the General
Prologue¡¯s portraits, though in the first case there is also some influence
from a similarly self-admiring speaker, La Vieille in the Romance of the
Rose. In all these cases, the subtle and invisible author¡¯s work can only
be read as he hopes if he finds ¡°fit readers,¡± people with the wit, the
intelligence to see beyond appearances and discern, judge, evaluate what is
being said in terms other than those of the potentially self-deluded speaking persona.
If the reader is not thinking, challenging, bringing other perspectives, he
will end up like the reporting pilgrim Chaucer, who is so taken in by the Monk¡¯s
self-justifying narrative that he can be heard confirming his options, (which
are fundamentally incompatible with the demands of the monastic life):
(And I seyde his
opinion was good.)
What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood,
Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure,
Or swynken with his handes, and laboure,
As Austyn bit? how shal the world be served?
(184-7)
He seems completely to be forgetting that ¡°serving
the world¡± is not something that a monk should be doing, even if he is from a
high-class family. ¡°Fit readers¡± must not be so indulgent. Yet few ¡°normal¡±
people automatically feel sympathy for aescesis, discipline and self-denial,
when the alternative is to have a good time and enjoy yourself to the full. Chaucer¡¯s
repsonse to the Monk is that of the majority; yet that does not make it right.
Now Chaucer¡¯s (unspoken) wish for fit,
discerning and intelligent readers, should be set alongside the work which most
closely resembles the Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio¡¯s Decameron. It
seems inconceivable that Chaucer was not influenced by it, but there is no
evidence that he knew it. Perhaps someone in Italy told him about it,
describing the framing structure and the story-telling competition. That would
have been enough. The most important point is not the similarity but the
difference. For in Boccaccio¡¯s work, I would say, there is no sense of a
tension or contradiction between ¡°sentence¡± and ¡°solaas.¡± The only thing all
the gay young folk gathered to escape the plague and death seem to want is fun,
entertainment, laughter, ¡°solaas¡±. The famous tales that explain why the
Decameron is still popular are all naughty ones, inspired by the fabliau
tradition, about sex and successful trickery.
Such tales are found in the Canterbury Tales
too, of course, and are equally popular among lovers of humour. Indeed, the Miller¡¯s
Tale is widely recognized as one of the world¡¯s greatest comic
masterpieces. But the Canterbury Tales equally includes the Nun¡¯s
Tale of the life and martyrdom of St. Cecilia, an officially canonized
saint, and ends with the Parson¡¯s Tale, a solemn theological treatise on
sin and forgiveness delivered after the Parson has fiercely refused to tell any
kind of entertaining story at all. A lot of Chaucer¡¯s intentions are uncertain,
because he never completed the work, but left it in a broken, fragmentary form,
tales without links or clearly identified tellers, pilgrims with tales barely
begun or no tales at all. Only one thing seems clear. By introducing the ¡°literary
contest¡± with the two conflicting categories of ¡°sentence¡± and ¡°solaas¡± at the
start, he is encouraging his readers to be constantly evaluating the tale they
are reading, and comparing it to others in those terms. In particular, by the
subtle connection between teller and tale, and the dramatized tensions between
different pilgrims, he reminds us of the techniques by which speakers attempt
to influence their audience. Sincerity and Truth, we know, are often less
important than success, especially in election campaigns and literary contests.
Telling people what they want to hear, rather than what they ought to hear is
usually the key to popularity. After all, they poisoned Socrates and crucified
Jesus for their refusal to do just that.
In its present shape, the Canterbury Tales
ends with the Parson¡¯s Tale, there is no sign of a return to London,
Harry Bailey¡¯s judgement and a joyful, drunken banquet. Instead, the Parson¡¯s
Tale is directly followed by a short note, known as the Retractions,
in which Chaucer surveys his total work in the light of Eternity and
distinguishes between the solaas-tending works, ¡°translacions and
enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke¡± (he appends a list,
including Troilus and the Canterbury Tales, or at least ¡°Thilke
that sownen into synne¡±) but he is proud of his serious, sentence-inclined
writing ¡°of the translacion of Boece De Consolacione, and othere bookes
of legendes of seintes, and omelies and moralitee, and devocioun./ that thanke
I oure Lord Jhesu Crist and his blisful mooder, and alle the seintes of hevene.¡±
In other words, Harry Bailly¡¯s plan suggests a
secular view of time and life, a pilgrimage being to him nothing but a journey
out and back, the after being much the same as the before, a system in which judgement
is simply a matter of ¡°knowing what I like.¡± By contrast, the structure of the Canterbury
Tales that Chaucer has left us, with the Parson¡¯s Tale at the
unexpected end, stands to remind readers that in the Christian view, each human
life is a never-ending pilgrimage, one that only reaches its goal when death
comes, usually before we are fully prepared. Judgement and reward in this case
are not the affair of Harry Baily with cakes and ale for all, but the affair of
God after we die, with Heaven and Hell the extreme alternatives.
This is stressed by the presence of so many
religious figures among the pilgrims, and the many references to Christianity
in the Tales. As you may recall, apart from the Parson and his Plowman brother,
who are indeed shining examples of Christian living, the Church-related figures
are all less than perfect models of their Christian calling. The Prioress is
mostly interested in behaving like a seductive courtly lady, the Friar in
making money, the Monk in hunting, all three of them are too fond of good food
and drink, while the Summoner and the Pardoner are a corrupt, monstrous pair
about whom even good pilgrim Chaucer finds it hard to be kind. We are
constantly being reminded that human life is in need of God¡¯s saving Grace, that
people are most of the time busy doing the things they ought not to do but very
much want do, and trying to forget the commandments of God. It is surely no
accident that at the very climax of the Miller¡¯s Tale, when the lusty
young wife of old John the Carpenter is busy in bed with Hende Nicolas the
student lodger, while her husband is lying asleep exhausted in a tub hung high
up in the roof, expecting to survive a new Noah¡¯s Flood, the narrator
introduces an unexpected reference to the prayers of the friars in a convent
outside the walls of the house:
And thus lith Alison and Nicholas,
In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas,
Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge,
And freres in the chaunsel gonne synge. (3653 –6)
The celebration of God¡¯s salvation coincides
with a moment of human depravity. Chaucer¡¯s depiction of various humanity is in
many ways not so unlike that found in the Augustan poets, full of the most
amazing contradictions, as Pope says at the start of Book 2 of the Essay on
Man:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! (13 –
18)
The Wife of Bath in her Prologue takes the most
widely-known materials of Christian antifeminist discourse, subverts them to
serve her own self-justifying purposes, delights her readers, and cannot see
that she is fashioning herself into a perfect embodiment of the female conduct
those writings denounce. We known what pain sexual infidelity can cause, and
that adultery is a grave breach of social order as well as of personal trust,
yet while reading the fabliaux, like the Miller¡¯s Tale, we
readers are very easily persuaded to cheer with the immoral and rejoice when
the dupes are duped. Not even Carpenter John¡¯s broken arm can prevent us
joining the laughing, gawping crowd of neighbors whose sympathies are firmly on
the side of the lovely, lively young folk with their irresistible sex-appeal.
The greedy Pardoner declares that his only goal is to trick the poor into
giving him their money; although the text of his sermon, which he presumably
stole from someone because he could never have composed it himself, is an
extraordinary anatomy of sin and denunciation of greed, having the power to
convert sinners, only not himself who has memorized it but cannot hear its
message.
But Chaucer is less simply a moral satirist
inclined to scoff at human foibles than Pope was. We can come closer to Chaucer¡¯s
way of seeing human life by examining his references to other works of
literature. We saw that the simply aesthetic criteria of the contest in
Boccaccio¡¯s Decameron do not correspond to the moral and religious
dimensions of the Canterbury Tales. This might be because Chaucer¡¯s
imagination is being informed by memories of another work he had read. The
portraits of the pilgrims, with their brief echoes of autobiographical tales,
might be thought to have some relation to the much longer series of encounters,
equally containing portraits with brief evocations of complex human stories,
comprising Dante¡¯s journey through Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise in the Commedia.
We know that Chaucer had a deep understanding of Dante¡¯s work by the way he
uses it as an ironic subtext to his Troilus. Chaucer, however, goes in
the opposite direction to Dante, and refuses to condemn or judge anyone or
anything. Here it is worth stressing the greatest difference between the two:
everyone that Dante meets on his great journey is already dead and judged. All
the figures whom Chaucer memorializes in the Canterbury Tales are alive,
and remain alive for ever by the power of the literary text, still today
engaged in the human adventure of making choices and advancing through life as
best they can. Their words and deeds will ultimately be subject to judgement by
God, and they ought to know that, but instead of God, Chaucer entrusts that
necessary evaluation and discernment to each individual reader. Chaucer¡¯s is a
poetry of life.
Modern authors, since the 18th
century, have mostly decided that readers should not be allowed too much
freedom, and have filled their narratives with words and devices designed to do
the work of evaluating and judging for them. Chaucer is amazingly modern in the
way he gives equal weight and value to multiple voices without ever suggesting
that all actions and every way of living or speaking are of equal value and
validity. There are good deeds and bad deeds, good people and bad people, he
agrees, just as there are good stories and not-so-good stories. Only the
decision as to which is which belongs to the generality of his readers, whose
qualities of judgement and discrimination need to be honed by a touchstonethat
no mere author can offer. Each person must decide in their own heart what are
the values by which he or she lives, and reads.
Chaucer was aware that Christians should never
be idealists since humanity is known to be sinful, only redeemed by grace and
love, not condemned out of hand on the basis of inflexible, impossible moral
laws. Dryden was speaking of that breadth of heart and vision when he said of
Chaucer that ¡°in him was God¡¯s plenty.¡± It is my opinion that Chaucer¡¯s
readers, by becoming ¡°fit readers¡± become better human beings at the same time,
so long as they apply the same criteria of judgement to themselves as they do
to the books they read and the people they meet. It may be that depth of
compassionate understanding, rather than his depictions of corruption in the
Church, that explains why in the 16th century Chaucer was considered
to have been a ¡°prophetic poet,¡± a label later applied to Edmund Spenser and
John Milton. The Christian prophet is, after all, not so much a fortune-teller
as a ¡°seer,¡± one who sees the real value of each person clearly and well in the
light of God¡¯s truth, speaking it out among all the confusions of human reality
and public opinion. To be a poet, according to that, is a high vocation indeed.
From here, we must end with some gigangtic
leaps, from Chaucer to modern times, from England to Korea. Three key words
will be our guide: poet, prophet, portrait.
Poets are the
hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic
shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what
they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they
inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the World.
Those
are the words with which Percy Bysshe Shelley ended the first part of his Defence
of Poetry. Early in Part One, he had anticipated the same theme by
reference to the past:
Poets,
according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared
were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets: a poet
essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds
intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present,
and his thoughts are the forms of the flower and the fruit of latest time.
What Shelley saw was that immensely serious
vocation of the poet; what he failed to recall, it seems, is the humiliation,
suffering, rejection and inglorious fate suffered by most of the Old Testament
prophets, and not only those. The great writer Osip Mandelstam once boasted
that it was only in the Soviet Union that ¡°they really respect poetry—they kill
because of it. More people die for poetry here than anywhere else.¡± and we
might wish to refer to Czeslaw Milosz¡¯s The Captive Mind (1953) in which
he wrote: ¡°In Central and Eastern Europe, the word ¡®poet¡¯ has a somewhat
different meaning from what it has in the West. There a poet does not merely
arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a ¡®bard,¡¯ that
his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of
interest to all the citizens.¡± The poet as prophet, indeed.
However, another ¡°prophetic¡± poet, the
contemporary British poet Christopher Hill, has argued that despite those
words, Milosz proposes a fundamentally flawed view of poetry, one first
formulated by Schiller in the words ¡°The right art is that alone, which creates
the highest enjoyment.¡± We find ourselves back at the tension between ¡°sentence¡±
and ¡°solaas.¡± Matthew Arnold was persuaded by Schiller¡¯s essentially ¡°aesthetic
valuation¡± of the finality of poetry to omit from the 1853edition of his Poems
his lyrical drama Empedocles on Etna on the grounds (stated in the ¡°Preface¡±)
that the work deals with a situation ¡°in which the suffering finds no vent in
action; . . . in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done¡±
and concluding that this was not ¡°a representation from which men can derive
enjoyment.¡± It should therefore not be republished.
Hill
recalls how W. B. Yeats, editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935
in 1936, excluded virtually all the poets of the First World War and justified
that by quoting Arnold¡¯s decision, which he expounded in his own words: ¡°passive
suffering is not a theme for poetry.¡± Famously, W. H. Auden tried to supply an
answer to that in the second section of his elegy ¡°In Memory of W. B. Yeats¡±:
Mad
Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now
Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For
poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the
valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, . . .
it survives,
A way of
happening, a mouth.
Hill
writes: ¡°Auden perhaps meant to say that the achieved work of art is its own
sufficient act of witness. If that is what he meant, I agree with him . . .¡±
(254) Hill refers to his project ¡°to propose a theology of language¡± and he
quotes a sermon by G. M. Hopkins:
To lift up
the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hands, a
woman with a sloppail, give him glory too, He is so great that all things give
him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live
Hill
concludes: ¡°Hopkins, with Victorian aesthetics at his fingertips, sometime
pupil of Walter Pater, leans away from the aesthetics equation, takes the
weight of the more awkward stresses of a world which, in justice, contains
aesthetics as a good, but is not to be either ruled or saved by them.¡± (255)
These phrases relate, I believe, to the same
possibilities of meaningful, compassionate, human poetry of ¡°sentence¡± relating
to life in ordinary society that we have been finding in Chaucer. Geoffrey
Hill, whose name and work I hope you know, has written: ¡°the art and literature
of the late twentieth century require a memorializing, a memorizing of the dead¡±.
There can be no doubt that Hill¡¯s poetry has pursued that task, for which he
feels an almost obsessive responsibility. The dead whom Hill most frequently
memorializes are the Jewish dead of the Shoah, or the Germans who tried to
assassinate Hitler; there are other poems in which he is looking further back,
to the dead of the Renaissance or the Middle Ages.
Hill¡¯s is very powerful writing but I want to end,
not with a British poet but a Korean one, Ko Un. I know him personally, I have
translated his work, he calls me his friend. Born in 1933, for over ten years a
Buddhist monk after experiencing unspeakable horrors as a teenager during the
Korean War, Ko Un wrote youthful poetry of immense power and sensuality.
Despairing of life, he attempted suicide before finding a meaningful vocation
in the struggles against military dictatorship in the 1970s. Included in the
lists of hundreds of people to be taken away at the start of Chun Doo-Hwan¡¯s
coup d¡¯etat in May 1980, Ko Un was condemned to life imprisonment after an
initial period of such isolation and insecurity that he became convinced that
he might be taken out and shot without warning at any moment.
That experience marks a radical turn in Ko Un¡¯s
life and work. When he was liberated in August 1982, he brought out of prison
with him the concept for a new poetic project, the Maninbo (Ten Thousand
Lives) series. In prison, confronting the possibility of imminent death, he had
become aware of himself as a locus of historic, social and national
memory. Korean Buddhism contains suggestions of the immense and lasting
significance of every human contact, be it the mere passing touch of a sleeve,
within the structures of relationship composing karma. At the same time,
Ko Un was strongly aware of the need to affirm that Korea¡¯s history must not be
seen as a succession of wars, brutal dictators and incompetent administrations;
Korea (like any land) is the sum total of its population, and the nameless,
voiceless masses are only nameless and voiceless to the elite who fear them. A
host of names and voices and tales remained alive in the memories that Ko Un
began to recover in the solitude of his cell. He felt it was his poetic duty to
ensure that each of those names and voices should be memorialized in the only
way open to him, within poems, raised beyond the merely anecdotal by the nature
of the poetic achievement. So far he has published twenty volumes of those
poetic portraits, records of humanity. I find myself brought back to Chaucer¡¯s
portraits; they go beyond the particular to become representative of our
diverse humanity.
In the foreword to the collection Haegŭmgang
(Sea Diamond Mountain), Ko Un says of his sense of poetic creation: ¡°If
someone opens my grave a few years after my death, they will find it full, not
of my bones, but of poems written in that tomb¡¯s darkness¡¦.¡± Now past his
seventieth year, Ko Un has spoken and written many words. If any are prophetic,
they will fulfill their task in due time. Only history can show what that task
was. Ours is to listen with unsealed ears, compassionate hearts, to the voice
of the poets, past and present, close at hand and far away – memorializing
lives marked by pain and joy, prophets of truth and hope, the true seers of
what it might mean to be truly human. That is why poetry really matters.
And to conclude, I must read at least one poem.
There is a word I have not used and it is unforgiveable: Beauty. True, I have
spoken of God, and goodness, and truth, and we all know, if only thanks to
Keats, that those are synonyms for beauty. A Korean poet, Ch¡¯on Sang-Pyong,
whose life was marked by pain and poverty, who maintained the spirit of a child
through it all, wrote a most extraordinary poem in 1970, after he had been
tortured and when he thought he was dying, prostrate with malnutrition and
exhaustion. It is very simple, it does not need any explanation; it is a
perfect poem:
Back
to Heaven
I'll go back to heaven again.
Hand in hand with the dew
that melts at a touch of the dawning day,
I'll go back to heaven again.
With the dusk, together, just we two,
at a sign from a cloud after playing on the
slopes
I'll go back to heaven again.
At the end of my outing to this beautiful world
I'll go back and say: It was beautiful. . . .