김부식의 노경시(老境詩)

Abstract

Prose of Kim Bu-sik (金富軾, 1075~1151) was so elegant and excellent that his poetry has been somewhat overlooked. However, his poetry was also nothing short of excellent compared to that of other poets. Although poems of Kim Bu-sik have been largely classified into ‘secular world’ and ‘natural world’, this might be rather valid only as a classification method by subject matter, but it is difficult to read his poems by distinguishing characteristics by the theme. If even poems contemplating and conflicting between working as a government official and retiring, and between the mundane world and nature are considered, this becomes ambiguous. Furthermore, whether the poem is about the mundane world or about nature, it originates from ‘I’ who intends to describe all the emotion that it encounters. Thus, the fact that it is a lyric poem flowing out of the lyrical self remains unchanged. In addition to such ‘lyricism’ of the individual self, another tendency that could be its complete opposite is institutional ‘enlightenment and discipline’ based on Confucian values as a Confucian scholar, an identity of Kim Bu-sik. In other words, they are the emotional poem about the expression of self- emotion and the Taoistic poem about the pursuit of truth. Focusing on these, this paper aims to shed new light on the poems of Kim Bu-sik.