포은 정몽주 시에 나타난 공간 상상력 - 물 이미지와 관련하여 -

Abstract

The poetic imagination of Jeong Mong-ju boasted very wide and broad scopes, which cannot be understood by being fixated on only one of them. Keeping it in mind, the investigator focused on the water images in his poetic world. That is, this study examined what imagination he exercised in relation to the “pond,” “stream,” “river,” and “sea,” which were his representative spaces related to water. Furthermore, it looked into correlations between the imaginations of those spaces and his life and ideology, thus trying to have an encounter with his special imagination related to water that had been neglected. In his works, the pond represents life and human nature & natural laws; the stream does an ideal and taste for the arts; the river does a territory and history; and the sea does an envoy trip and homesickness. The essential functions of water were related to life, and they met Neo-Confucianism and formed the important aspects of his poetic world. The stream was located at the grand zenith of Dohoi and served as a place for him to rest, in which aspect an ideal and taste for the arts were presented. Being the boundary between areas, the river appeared as a representation of territory or a historical field related to it. The sea was one of the representative spaces he faced on his enjoy trips and became a device for him to miss his hometown at the end of the sky for its vast scope. Understanding Jeong Mong-ju, it is needed to focus on his aspects as a thinker or “Dongbangihakjijo(東方理學之祖)” and as a diplomat he showed in over seven envoy trips after the war. Considering them, it is estimated that his spatial imagination of pond and stream highlights his aspects as a thinker based on Neo-Confucianism and that his spatial imagination of river and sea highlight his aspects as a bureaucrat around his envoy trips. The two were, however, not consistent in intensity and scope since his aspects as a bureaucrat were more highlighted than those as a thinker, which means that he engaged in his creative activities by making sensitive responses to the reality of the times.