Gas Light
The Poems of Kim Gwang-gyoon
Description
"A Short Piece"
It must be that the azaleas
Bloom at dawn
And fall at dusk.
Over the low pine grove
Behind the rocks in Samchung Dong
They droop
Whenever the clouds pass.
All through April
Unnoticed by any
This year's azaleas also
Must be blooming in the shade
And falling in the shade.
Kim Gwang-gyoon (1914–1993) started his poetic career by contributing to major Korean newspapers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Considered one of the most prominent modernist poets in Korea, Kim often wrote in styles that resembled those of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Many of Kim's poems written during the Japanese military rule over Korea deal with his concept of "painting-like poetry," depicting landscapes and ideas in vivid imagery reminiscent of William Carlos Williams' early poems. After Korea's liberation in 1945, and especially after the division of the country into North and South, Kim turned to lamenting and elegizing various sorts of loss—of his hometown, of his family members and friends, of his past loves and passions. He is also noted for the nearly forty-year-long hiatus he took from poetry following the Korean War; he did not return to the literary scene until the late 1980s. Among his major works are Gas Light, A Port of Call, Twilight Elegy, and Imjin Flower.