Study On New Images As Absence of Lover And Symbols Of Ego: Focused On ‘Maechang Collections’

『매창집(梅窓集)』에 나타난 ‘새’ 이미지 연구

The paper studies about the meaning of the birds appearing in Maechang’s poem as a trigger of poetic feeling, a spokesperson of Maechang’s soul, and a counterparty of affinity. Through the birds, we look at the darkness and brightness of her life, her body and soul, and the birds as a poetic target linking between earth and heaven. The importance and position of birds are outstanding throughout Maechang’s poem, compared to other passive symbols of nature. The birds are expressed as diverse appearances and symbols in the overall her poem. This study finds that the author’s poetic loneliness led by the situation of absence of lover is getting stronger through transcendental desire for heaven. Moreover, this paper studies about how the desire for freedom against morals, regulations, and customs encounters woman’s unique sensitivity. This paper mainly analyzes the birds’ implied images shown in Maechang’s poem, focusing on with what point of view she looks at the birds, what meaning and existing position the birds have in her poem, what symbolic meaning the birds’ images contain, and how the images of the birds are harmonized with the world that Maechang is pursuing. This paper semantically studies the birds in her works. Consequently, it is able to show that she transmits her loneliness felt under the situation of absence of lover and thus the birds are the targets of her desire to overcome the situation. Although this paper can induce the birds’ meaning appearing in Maechang’s works, it also has a limit of the possibility of other interpretations. For this, it is needed to consider from other origins diverse expressing methods and meaning expansion which are spreading through management of poetic words rather than surface view. Birds are her other self and a spokesman of her soul to Maechang who has a spirit filled with lightning like thunder and a deep crack. More originally, the birds flying free in heaven is a messenger between gods and human and thus they are always something that Maechang is longing for. In addition, the eyes of Maechang always contain compassion on all nature including herself, the world, and nature objects. Birds are spotlighted as the only existence who pursues a union with nature and can directly communicate with human beings. The birds appearing in her lyric poem, Maechang’s birds who communicate with the world through nature and get to know how to become one with and within nature, are a proved metaphor of herself who creates and forms by herself.