『마지막 시집』에 나타난 삶과 죽음의 역설

Abstract

The value of metaphor in creating a context for the calm acceptance of death is obvious: Lawrence's recognition that the mechanistic universe is a metaphor, not a statement of fact, allows him to replace the mechanistic metaphor with an organic epistemology of relatedness. Consequently, “death is not evil, evil is mechanistic.” To reject death is to reject God, to sever one's connection to the living universe, to reshape oneself into a closed, self-sufficient ego. Accepting one's place as a small piece of the tissue of living universe necessarily entails accepting death as a necessary part of the universe process. Evil is doorless, closed, unchanging, mechanical. It is the wheel of machinery, neither alive nor dead, fixed upon its hub and going nowhere, continually moving but never changing. The metaphors of mechanism have destroyed the universe, sucking out its life; these metaphors are similarly killing our souls, leaving them equally lifeless. A journey to the underworld is a journey to the “heart of things,” a paradoxical process of corruption and separation into wholeness. When a flower “opens,” it becomes a doorway to the creative unknown itself, an opening, in “Bavarian Gentians,” to the nucleus of the underworld, a “forked torch” that gives the speaker the knowledge to imagine death as a culmination, a return to wholeness, a stage in the process animated by the creative unknown. The dark tomb is also the dark womb, as division and wholeness become ultimately “married” into one process, the flux of life-energy.