뢰트키 시에 나타나는 아버지의 상징적 의미

Abstract

Roethke’s childhood was spent in his father’s greenhouse. His horticulturist father, who was the center of his childhood world, died when the poet was a teenager. Still living on in his son’s memory, Roethke’s father exerts complicated influences on the poet’s life and work. First of all, his father is a symbol of strength and wisdom. Contacting and converging with natural energy, his father gives life to his son and his plants. For them, his father is a source of love and security. The father controls the atmosphere of his son’s life like the temperature of the greenhouse. He establishes order in the greenhouse and the young poet follows it like all the plants there. However, the adolescent poet has a sense of inferiority because of his father, and his early death gives the poet a feeling of fear and a guilty conscience. The poet doesn’t think that he can live up to his father’s expectations, and after his father’s early death he feels like a lost son, alone and outside of his childhood paradise. His father is alive in the poet’s memory; sometimes he is angry with him, but sometimes he guides him out of the dark and cold world to meet the light and ordered world. In his later poems, God replaces his father, but has all the same characteristics of the poet’s father, giving love and anger. The poet goes back to his father’s greenhouse when he feels lost and weak, and the past world of his father serves as a background for sudden mystical enlightenment. His father’s greenhouse is a world of lost paradise which still exists somewhere; the poet misses and hopes to find it again. The poet’s complicated relationship with his father and its symbolic meaning are important factors in his poems. (Cheju Halla College)