윤동주 시 연구 －현실 인식과 동심 지향성을 중심으로－

Abstract

This essay focuses on Dongju Yoon’s children’s poetry in order to reach a comprehensive understanding of his sense of reality and national consciousness. At the time the Japanese oppression was at its peak in Korea, Yoon strived to fight the grim reality of his time and to promote hope for Korea’s independence from Japan by sublimating his feelings about his miserable life as a citizen of a colonized country in his children’s poetry about innocent children. Writing children’s poetry was particularly an important decision on his part as children’s poetry with its poetic language that kept the purity of the Korean language provided him with an effective means to represent the life of Koreans suffering from the Japanese oppression and exploitation. Even after his earliest stage in which he focused on writing children’s poems, Yoon continued to write poems the basic sentiment of which was childlike innocence. By utilizing children’s innocent perspective, Yoon asserted the importance of persevering and trying to overcome the dark reality of his country in a powerful, albeit indirect, manner. Yoon believed that childlike innocence could offer ways to overcome any hardships or evil of human society, and this belief accounts for the persistent presence of the sentiment of innocent children in his poetry. As a symbol of the conscience of a poet who had to endure the dark reality of his time, the sentiment of childlike innocence which is so prominent in his poetry thus can be understood not as a sign of his withdrawal from history but as his active engagement in history.