Cho Kyuik begins his study of the kagok-ch'angsa (literally kagok-song-lyric, his preferred term for the genre more commonly called shijo) by pointing out that Korea has two poetry traditions: the hanshi tradition (poems in Chinese following the rules of Chinese prosody), which is a poetry to be read and contemplated; and the vernacular tradition (hyangga, Koryo kayo, kasa and what today we call shijo), which is a poetry to be sung and heard. The common denominator across the vernacular songs, he tells us, is the kasa, literally music words. Kasa includes under its umbrella all vernacular songs. The songs we call shijo today - shijo as a term referring to a literary text is a twentieth century coinage - are a subdivision of kasa. Originally sung to the kagok-ch'ang, the accompaniment was complex, featuring five sung sections and two musical interludes, and requiring the services of a considerable ensemble. The shijo-ch'ang, a much simpler musical accompaniment, featuring three sung sections, whose rhythms could be beaten out on a drum or, if needs be, on the thigh of the singer, was not developed until the middle of the 19th century. Scholars are not sure exactly when.[1] The songs we call kasa today, are a specific genre that developed either at the end of Koryo or at the beginning of Choson. Scholars hardly agree on anything about the genre except that it is a four-umbo (breath-group) structure. They are not even agreed on whether it is prose or poetry. Some see kasa primarily as prose or as an essay in verse-song form; others see kasa as song; still others divide the genre into kasa song and kasa essay; Cho Tongil posits a new genre, neither drama, lyric, nor epic, a genre whose primary focus is didactic.[2]
Since Chinese was the language of literature throughout the Choson dynasty, Chong Ch'ol's primary literary vehicle was hanshi. He is credited with 763 hanshi and four pu (odes in Chinese characters). However, like many prominent poet-officials at the time, he also liked to compose in the vernacular. He is credited with four or five kasa, depending on whether "Changjinjusa" (An Invitation to Imbibe) is treated as a kasa or as a sasol shijo; and some 107 shijo, of which seventeen are of very doubtful ascription, and others more or less doubtful, leaving about eighty or ninety that are accepted by the commentators. These vernacular poems are collected in Songgang kasa (Pine River was Chong Ch'ol's penname). A Shijo Poet in the Court of King Sonjo is a translation of Songgang kasa.
Educated in the Confucian classics, Chong Ch'ol's earliest poetry training was in Chinese poetry. It seems reasonable therefore to conclude that the hanshi represent the poet's more serious literary side, whereas the shijo and kasa represent the poet in moments of leisure or at least in less formal literary mode. After all, the literati continued to treat the vernacular as onmun (vulgar language) until the end of the nineteenth century when nationalist considerations endowed the native language with new meaning and energy. This assessment, however, must not be pushed too far. The literary quality of many of the shijo is self-evident and the kasa are the work of an urbane, cultivated poet. Korean commentators traditionally revere Chong Ch'ol as the greatest exponent of the kasa genre - his kasa were immensely popular in his own lifetime - and they consistently place him among the master shijo poets. So, even if the hanshi far outstrip the vernacular poems in terms of volume and Choson dynasty prestige, the vernacular poems have carved their own lasting niche in terms of literary quality and creative genius. Today, in Korea, no one speaks of Chong Ch'ol's Chinese poems; he is remembered as a master vernacular poet.
Chong Ch'ol's poetry teachers, Im Okryong (1496-1568) and Ki Taesung (1527-1572), favored a return to the romantic, confessional tradition of Tang poetry in preference to the Song tradition, with its emphasis on structure, form, and classical allusion, which had been in the ascendancy in the first part of Choson. Ki Taesung explained the world in terms of chong (emotion) and ki (energy).[3] Poetry, he says, has to do with chong. A poem begins with an external object and then moves to the heart. The objective of the poem is to elicit hung, that inner excitement associated with Zen penetration of essences, which Korean poets consider to be the heart of the poetry experience. Master and student illustrate the point. Ki Taesung writes:
In the front yard wildflower fragrance balances on the breeze.
It's like a dream; I waken from wine drunk early in the day.
Flowers flutter deep in the garden; spring days are long.
Over the bead curtain I see bees and butterflies dizzily at play.
Chong Ch'ol's answering poem, "Duck Asleep on the Sand" shows the student already outstripping the master:
The wind gets up; there's a gentle fluttering of wings.
Colored plumage shimmers even more beautifully in the sun.
Dive complete, the duck leaves the water;
the sand is so warm, he sinks into sleep.
Ki Taesung's poem begins with the scene in the yard, which he describes by focusing on flower fragrance. This is his cue to move to the heart, to his feelings of being in a dream paradise, which generate the hung mood. The poem, however, is filled with conventional images from the Chinese tradition. Spring flower fragrance, the wine that brings heightened awareness, the joy of spring as reflected in the joy of the smallest insects, and the implied ephemeral nature of existence — all these are conventional. Fragrance "balancing" on the breeze is the only creative image in the poem.
Chong Ch'ol's poem is much more accomplished. He observes the duck very closely, catching the colors of spring, the duck's languid movements and the laziness of the spring mood. The duck comes out of the water and sinks into the warm sand - an elegant description of the poet's own feelings of hung. This is symbolist poetry three hundred years before the French invented the term, first-rate stuff and a useful yardstick against which to measure Chong Ch'ol's shijo and kasa.
Something quite extraordinary happened to Korean poetry at the beginning of the Choson dynasty. Simply stated, passion disappeared. Take, for example, the opening stanza of the Koryo kayo "Spring Pervades the Pavilion":
I make a bed of bamboo leaves;
I spread them on the ice.
Though my love and I should freeze unto death,
slowly, slowly, pass this night
in love's enduring gentleness.
There is nothing like this in Choson poetry, not at least until Hwang Chini's famous mid-winter night shijo, which was written some two hundred years into the dynasty:
I'll cut a piece from the waist
of this interminable eleventh moon night,
and wind it in coils beneath these bedcovers,
warm and fragrant as the spring breeze,
coil by coil to unwind it the night my lover returns.
This is kisaeng poetry free from the constraints that circumscribed most yangban poetry. Chong Ch'ol has nothing comparable. In fact, a rare attempt to be sexually daring ends up in something rather coarse in the shijo that he built around a pun on a kisaeng's name, Chin'ok (Pure Jade), with whom he was on intimate terms.
Genuine jade, they said;
I thought it mere imitation.
Now that I see it, I must admit, it is indeed pure jade.
I have
a fleshly awl and with it I will drill.
The redeeming wit of Chin'ok's purported reply, punning on Chong Ch'ols name (pure ore) takes away a measure of Chong Ch'ol's crudeness:
Metal I thought yes,
but metal of an inferior kind.
Now I see it's metal of the purest mint.
I have a bellows:
I think I ought to melt that metal down.
Passion would not be tolerated in Choson. Yi T'oegye, a pillar of Choson dynasty Confucian orthodoxy, to whom the reforming Easterners looked for inspiration, frowned at such poems. He regarded them as a vulgar, corrupting influence, which ought to be kept out of the reach of children. In Eliot's terms, Choson society experienced a sort of dissociation of sensibility Passion left Korean poetry and it did not begin to return until teachers like Ki Taesung in the sixteenth century advocated a return to the Tang tradition of chong and ki.
When passion left Korean poetry, the moral aspect became dominant; indeed, the need for a physical poetry disappeared. Yi Kyubo (1168-1241), the great Koryo poet, describes the experience of drinking tea in physical terms:
With a pot of tea I try an experiment in taste;
it's like frozen snow going down my throat.
He pinpoints the joy of paduk:
The pleasure is in the clinking of the stones.
These images focus on the physical; taste and sound leap off the page with fresh immediacy. In the poetry of Choson, the physical is rare; the central emphasis is moral. Chong Pyong'uk tells us that Korean poets are never interested in the physically beautiful. When they look at a flower or a mountain they do not see something beautiful in physical terms, they see a symbol of a beautiful moral quality.[4] There is very little physical description in the hanshi of Yi Saek, Kil Chae, So Kojong or Kim Shisup, accomplished though these poets may be. Pinghodang's "Final Couplet", written early in the sixteenth century is so unusual, it startles:
A jade ribbon hangs from the eaves;
silver bells make circles where they drop.
Nam Sshi, a woman presumed also to have lived in the early part of the sixteenth century wrote a couplet, "Song of the Snow" that is even more startling:
Snow falling on the ground:
silkworms munching mulberry leaves.
Snow flying through the air:
butterflies lighting gently on flowers.
Poets simply had not written in this mode since the end of Koryo. Invariably a poem began with an image and moved quickly to an inner landscape. Chong Ch'ol's "Duck Asleep on the Sand" does indeed give the physical feel of the object, but it would be unwarranted to conclude that this effect is representative of his oeuvre. Physical description is rare in Chong Ch'ol's poems. Certainly it appears in some of the shijo but not all that often, and there are descriptive passages in the kasa, "Kwandong pyolgok," for example, that also reveal a keen sense of observation, but the "moral" emphasis remains dominant. As for passion, the love kasa and love shijo are about as close as Chong Ch'ol gets. However, the traditional allegorical interpretation of these poems in terms of love of the king does not help in making a case for passion. The sentiments expressed in "Samiin kok", however, are at least dramatic and forceful. We glimpse the ardor of a woman scorned. This had been missing from Korean poetry for several hundred years.
As a body of work, Chong Ch'ol's vernacular poems are a mixed bag, ranging from the fine descriptive passages and Confucian moral sentiments of "Kwandong pyolgok" to the ardor of "Samiin kok", and from the exquisite satire of the political shijo poems, which are without precedent in the earlier history of the shijo genre, to the bland, didactic rhetoric of the "Hunmin ka" series. In general, the shijo show the hanshi technique of beginning with an observed object before moving to a moral comment. Many of the shijo support the idea of a poetry centered on chong, but very few of them are concerned with eliciting hung. Chong Ch'ol's shijo rarely engage beauty as theme. They are much more practical: they are about wine, politics, relationship with the king, and the vagaries of the human heart. Satire and humor are the primary tools. There are exceptions. The shijo describing the scene after the paduk game, for example, elicits hung. Some of the wine poems also elicit hung. However, such shijo are rare. The best of the shijo are on a par with the best of the hanshi but for different reasons: their strength is a striking versatility in the use of language - the startling phrase, the spare elegant expression, the density of meaning, the use of irony, qualities quite distinct from the more traditional felicities of the hanshi. Chong Ch'ol's shijo are a milestone in the development of Korean as poetic language.
What happens if you pull down
beams and supports?
A host of opinions greet the leaning skeleton house.
Carpenters
with rulers and ink keep milling around.
This depiction of the confusion in the court at the time of Hideyoshi's invasion has the edge of the surgeon's scalpel. The speaker sees the state as a ramshackle house. The images are clear, precise, and incisive; beams and supports are qualified and their meanings extended by the use of the word skeleton with all its connotations, and the final image of carpenters running around with rulers and ink provides comedy and irony. Chong Ch'ol's political allegory poems are his finest achievement in the shijo genre. When he depicts the insecurity of a politician's life, the isolation and rejection that accompany loss of office are palpable:
The tree is diseased;
no one rests in its pavilion.
When it stood tall and verdant, no one passed it by.
But the leaves
have fallen, the boughs are broken; not even birds
perch there now.
Again the speaker observes an object and builds a symbolic response. The broken tree as a symbol of sterility is as old as poetry itself. Note that the tree is not described in any detail.
Ch'ong Ch'ol's poem depicting the dangers inherent in political over-exposure is not quite to the same standard, but still the irony inherent in the poem makes it stand out from the work of most of his contemporaries:
Why does that pine tree stand
so near the road?
I wish it stood a little back, perhaps in the hollow behind.
Everyone
geared with rope and axe will want to cut it down.
Anyone familiar with Korea's spitting culture will smile at Chong Ch'ol's assessment of the factional fighting and consequent corruption that characterized his political world:
White gull,
floating on the water,
it was an accident my spit hit you on the back.
White gull,
don't be angry: I spat because the world is a dirty place.
The desire for integrity, for inner cleanliness, has always been the mark of the cultivated man. Whatever about the contradictions in his character, Chong Ch'ol's best poems are pervaded by a fine sense of humanity; he seems to frame them within a very personal context. Perhaps more than anywhere else, these finer human feelings can be discovered in poems that deal with the theme of transcendence. Indeed the finest shijo seem to deal with this theme, but then perhaps the finest poetry always does.
A shadow is reflected in the water;
a monk is crossing the bridge.
Monk, stay a moment; let me ask you where you're going?
Pointing his stick
at the clouds, he passes without a backward glance.
Here we see contrasted the disparate experience of two people, a monk who presumably has penetrated the secret of transcendence and a speaker represented as indolent but willing to learn. The focus in the poem is on the speaker. He is the one who is brought face to face with truth; he is the one who achieves the insight. The ability to perceive the transcendent in others and the lack of it in oneself is one of the distinguishing marks of the good poet. Chong Ch'ol had this quality:
A sudden shower
splatters a lotus leaf,
but I cannot find the track of water.
I wish my heart
were like that leaf, that nothing ever stained it.
The sigh of relief the poet gives in the following poem when he finds himself free of the burden of office is almost audible. This, however, is in part a conventional response. The ranking bureaucrats who affirmed such noble sentiments invariably had aspirations to return to office:
Pearly raindrops on green hills,
how can you deceive me?
Sedge rain cape and horsehair hat, how can you deceive me?
Two days ago
I took off my silk robes; now nothing soilable remains.
Wine was Chong Ch'ol's nemesis. In his writings he notes that most of the messes in his life were caused by over-indulgence. How awful, he exclaims, to waken in the morning with a terrible head and not be able to remember the insults one may have ladled out the previous night! Several shijo deal with wine associated problems. As a group they do not reach the heights achieved in the political allegories, but the best of them are very fine indeed and show the poet's basic method, focusing on a central image with a strong injection of irony, very often in the form of the poet laughing at himself:
The lad has gone to dig fernbrake;
the bamboo grove is empty.
Who will pick up the pieces scattered across
the paduk board?
Reclined
against a pine tree root, inebriate, I do not feel the approach of day.
Paduk (Go in Japan), a game like chess, is very popular in Korea.
The poet paints a picture of himself as a new day dawns: drunk as a coot after the party, but in harmony with his world, except perhaps for a little tongue-in-cheek, Oscar Wilde style yangban humor, expressed in terms of regret that the boy who looks after him is not around to tidy up the place. This is one of Chong Ch'ol's best poems. It is perhaps significant that it reads more like a quatrain than a shijo.
Some of the wine shijo are part of a series, with the speaker addressing a personified wine character and the wine character answering. The sheer whimsy of these poems gives them a special charm. The speaker declares:
Ten years I followed you
believing I'd be an achiever.
But you say you hate me, that I've achieved nothing. Perhaps
I should write on temperance as a token of farewell.
Wine answers:
If you truly hoped to achieve something,
would you have cultivated me from the start?
You always seemed pleased to see me; so I followed you around.
Now you tell me
I'm bad: you'll have to give me up!
Finally, the speaker declares his dilemma:
I say it once again:
I cannot live without you.
You let me forget the bad and the bitter.
Can I now
discard an old friend in favor of a new love?
Not part of the series but certainly in the same vein, the speaker laughs wryly at his dependence:
I'm fifty now, no longer young.
Yet wherever I go, at the mere sight of wine,
I break into a broad toothy grin. What's wrong with me?
Wine is an old, old
acquaintance: I cannot ever forget him.
Finally, perhaps Chong Ch'ol's most praised wine poem:
Yesterday I heard that Master Song
from over the hill has new wine.
I kicked the ox to its feet, threw on a saddlecloth
and rode up here.
Boy,
is your master home? Tell him Chong Ch'ol has come.
Critics traditionally have regarded this poem as epitomizing the mot (elegance) of the sonbi (scholar). This is a poem, they maintain, of quintessential hung. If you visualize the incongruity of a ranking bureaucrat perched on the back of an ox, going unannounced to another man's house and declaring that it's party time, you will get the idea. To a Western sensibility it's mostly cheek; to a Korean sensibility it's style!
Chong Ch'ol's kasa are of special interest because of the kasa concept they enshrine. Western sensibility does not have a concept of an essay poem. Comparisons have been made with the pastoral tradition in England, but such comparisons do not stand up to scrutiny. English poetry, in fact, has nothing like the kasa. Korean yangban poets saw themselves in terms of harmony with a cleansing natural world; their kasa were songs, Choson's answer to the poetry challenge of Koryo. Instead of the passionate, unbridled emotion of Koryo kayo, yangban kasa presented an urbane, descriptive, essay-style poetry, which stuck to good Confucian doctrinal lines. Kasa advocated loyalty and fidelity, affirmed the primacy of self-cultivation, promoted harmony with nature, and controlled all excess of feeling. Only in its later development did the genre expand to include problems from the everyday lives of the people. The result was a safe, controlled poetry discourse. The essay or poem debate has been partially fuelled by the fact that kasa were recorded in continuous prose format. It should be pointed out that in many of the anthologies shijo were also recorded in continuous prose format. Whether kasa or shijo, the Korean poet’s understanding of the poetry line is quite different from that of an English poet. For a Korean poet, the line tends to be arbitrary. This is inevitable in a poetry culture that does not employ meter, rhyme, assonance or dissonance and where position in the line is not of semantic significance. The breath unit, umbo, is the dominant consideration in Korean prosody.
There are two theories about when Chong Ch'ol wrote "Songsan pyolgok". One theory says he wrote it in 1560 as an immature young man of twenty-five. The second theory centers on the "washing the ears" phrase, which it interprets not just as a classical reference to the Chinese retainer who refused the offer of a kingdom, but as a reference to something Sonjo said to Yulgok when the latter asked for permission to retire from court in 1575. The incident left a bad taste because Sonjo's words seemed to imply that Yulgok was washing his hands of public affairs, taking the easy way out. Sonjo did not try to prevent Yulgok from going, nor did he withdraw his statement. Bad feeling continued through 1577 when Chong Ch'ol is surmised to have written the poem.
Songsan (Mount Star) is in Ch'angp'yong in Cholla Province. The poem celebrates the aesthetic life of Kim Songwon through the four seasons on Mount Star. Kim Songwon and Chong Ch'ol were particularly close friends although they were separated by an age gap of eleven years. They had studied together and Chong Ch'ol's wife was related to Kim.
"Songsan pyolgok" has a threefold structure: an introduction featuring the scene and introducing the hermit, the main body of the poem, which presents the delights of the place through the four seasons, and a conclusion, which is a meditation on history and on the current times. The introductory section has two parts. In the first part (lines 1-6), a wayfarer poses a question: Why does the master remain here in seclusion? The second part (lines 6-15) describes the scene around the house and pavilion in terms of the world of the Immortals and introduces the hermit who is the embodiment of an Immortal. The wayfarer is presumably Chong Ch'ol. For reasons of clarity, the translation identifies the wayfarer with the "I" narrator. In the main body of the poem, the wayfarer answers his own question by enumerating the delights of life here through the four seasons. Lines 16 -25 describe the scene in spring and the busy life of the hermit. Lines 26-41 describe the scene and mood of summer, with hermit and narrator both enjoying summer delights. Lines 42-58 paint the autumn scene, with an emphasis on its idyllic nature. Lines 59-66 describe the riches of the hermit life against a winter background. The poem is rounded off with a concluding section, which features a number of themes: lines 67-74 speak of the delights of reading about the heroes of old; lines 75-84 recount the vicissitudes of the current time. The poem finishes with hermit and wayfarer sharing the wine cup and playing the kayagum, the Immortals' answer to the problems of the times.
The poem is conventional in that a wayfarer would hardly stay for a year and could hardly observe the four seasons simultaneously. The basic format of the poem is question and answer, but there are problems at times in identifying the speaker. Some critics bring Kim Songwon directly into the poem; they have him speak two brief sections toward the end: the passages on the delights of history and the flying Immortal. It seems best in terms of the unity of the poem, however, to take the simplest approach: to posit a single speaker, with the hermit moving in and out of the scene, an Immortal presence rather than a speaking character. This way, the contrast between the world of the Immortals and the world of the court is pointed, as is the dilemma Chong Ch'ol faces in his own life between the delights of retirement and the rewards of service. "Songsan pyolgok" is heavily Chinese and is traditionally the least highly regarded of Chong Ch'ol's kasa, but it has an integrated theme, which "Kwandong pyolgok" lacks.
The long kasa, "Kwandong pyolgok", and the series of sixteen shijo, "Hunmin ka", date from Chong Ch'ol's period as governor of Kangwon Province in 1580. In Sop'o manp'il Kim Manjung notes that "Kwandong pyolgok", "Samiin kok" and "Sokmiin kok" are all we have from antiquity of fine writing in the vernacular. "Sokmiin kok", he claims, is the finest of the three because the other two are heavily indebted to Chinese. Kim Manjung's credentials as critic supreme have never been established, yet he is the most widely quoted critical authority for Mid-Choson poetry. He is on record as saying that Hwang Chini, while an inferior poet, has her poems passed on from generation to generation because she is a woman, an opinion few contemporary scholars would accept. He gives no reasons to support his critical positions, hardly the credentials of a first-rate critic. Chong Ch'ol's kasa are all heavily Chinese indebted, "Sokmiin kok" admittedly less than the others, but nevertheless the Chinese influence is clear. The titles of all Chong Ch'ol's kasa are Chinese.
In 1555, Paek Kwanghong (1522-1556), the elder brother of the celebrated hanshi poet, Paek Kwanghun (1537-1592), was appointed to an official post in P'yongan Province. The appointment led to the writing of "Kwanso pyolgok" (Song of the Northwest), the first kasa to describe the scenery of a province. Paek's poem influenced a host of subsequent travel kasa, most notably Chong Ch'ol's "Kwandong pyolgok." Korean commentators traditionally place "Kwandong pyolgok" at the apex of kasa composition, but they have been slow to spell out the criteria that make such a high evaluation possible. The traditional high valuation of the poem, however, does much to elucidate Korean poetry attitudes both in Choson and in contemporary times. It is a testimony to the continuance of the moral stance as the heart of the Korean poetry tradition.
"Kwandong pyolgok" is a scholar-official's essay-style meditation in verse on the beauties of the Diamond Mountains and that part of the East Coast that comes under the umbrella of the Kwandong area, in general terms from Samilp'o in North Korea to Ulchin in North Ch'ungch'ong Province. The predominant emotion is awe, an awe peppered, as one would expect from a scholar-official, with allusions to king and office, to the illustrious sages of Confucian tradition, Confucius and Mencius, to outstanding Chinese poets like Li Bai and Lim Bai, and to the great Taoist teacher Lao Zi. Although the poem does not set out to be a treatise on loyalty to the king or a primer on the qualities of a good governor, the poet, Confucian trained and surrounded by the enduring Confucian symbols of mountains and water, is constantly reminded of these considerations. The poem has some lovely descriptive passages:
These descriptive passages alone make the poem worthwhile.
The weakness of "Kwandong pyolgok" as a piece of literature is that when Chong Ch'ol has expressed his awe at natural beauty in mountain peaks and waterfalls and at man-made beauty in pagodas and terraces, he does not have much else to say. The poem lacks an integrating theme, a controlling point of view, a dramatic center of any kind. Most of all, it lacks the satirical edge and fine irony that distinguishes the best of his shijo poems. The poet presumably traveled with an entourage, but to all intents and purposes he is on his own, except for those brief passages when he is carried in a sedan chair. He meets no one, talks to no one, does not broaden his experience. Very often the speaker in a Ch'ong Ch'ol hanshi or shijo is alone, but his experience is related to the experience of others and there is invariably some kind of enlargement of spirit, as for example, in the famous shijo about the monk crossing the bridge. There is no such enlargement in "Kwandong pyolgok". The poem remains an urbane expression of the world of a Choson dynasty bureaucrat. Kim Manjung's claim that it is one of three poems that constitute all we have from antiquity of fine writing in the vernacular will not stand up to scrutiny. Obviously Kim Manjung is not even considering shijo.
"Samiin kok" (Love Song) was written in 1585, the eighteenth year of the reign of Sonjo. The poet was fifty, out of office, forced home to Ch'angp'yong; his Westerner faction had been roundly defeated by the dominant Easterners. He spent his time in study, savoring the delights of retirement in nature. Despite all the protestations of harmony in nature, it was a time of intense feelings of political alienation, rejection and personal bitterness, his longest career period out of the political limelight. Kim Manjung compares "Samiin kok" and "Sokmiin kok" to the "Li sao" of Qu Yuan, a satire on the blindness of the Fair One (the king of Chu) written after the courtier, a victim of slander, was expelled from the court