셰이머스 히니 시에 나타난 동서양 연금술의 이미지

Abstract

This study is to explore the relationship with alchemistic meanings as literary images and four elements such as water, fire, air and earth, and to apply to Seamus Heaney's poems with Gaston Bachelard's material imagination. A research that an alchemist makes for four elements' materiality is no different from writing that a poet expresses poetic words with his own. While Greek alchemy is philosophical and scientific, Egyptian alchemy is practical and mystic. The latter has thoughts for the immortality of the soul and processes for smelting, refining and remaking metals associated with ceremonies for suffering, dying and reviving. Western alchemists generally think that a soul soaks into a material as hylozoism. Chinese alchemy includes the Five Elements - fire, water, wood, metal and earth similar with four elements. Indian alchemy marks asceticism like yoga in alchemic operations. Eastern alchemy tends to associate human body with microcosmos. Heaney creates a blacksmith or a churning worker as a kind of alchemist in his poems, like Eliade's noting that alchemists and blacksmiths are based on an occult and primitive experiences and spirits. And Heaney's poetic writings can be associated with Bachelard's archetype criticism in images of earth or bogland. In “Undine” and “Anything can Happen”, Heaney associates Irish myth with four elements' dynamic imagination. In “Away form It All”, daily life and past myth coexist dialectically. Heaney recognizes dynamic qualities of four elements and coexistence with contrary elements, fulfills alchemic images with his own poetic words.