An Airy Imagination in Children’s Poetry by Oh Soon-taek: Focusing on Olfactory and Auditory Languages

Abstract

The poet, Oh Soon-taek pursues beauty, purity, and brightness, features of human’s nature in his children’s poetry. There are frangrances and sounds on the foundation of the beauty, purity, and brightness. He makes his readers dream new things and opens an entry for them to experience new world of imagination, through olfactory and auditory images. Fresh airy embodiment provides readers invigoration, definitely. Therefore, this study aims to analyze olfactory and auditory languages focusing on the entire poems of Oh Soon-taek and to trace airy imagination expressed in his children’s poetry. Though the poetic words related to fragrances are not signified in the poet’s works, he is not afraid of trying freely to olfactoryize hearing and to auditoryize olfaction. In addition, he is a subject who experiences more diverse auditory illusions than actual hearing and nature is like a mouth containing every auditory element to him. As mentioned above, the poet puts richly attractive fragrances and sounds in nature with his own imagination, and they are tied in his fantasy world as embodiment of infinite words and images in spite of no forms. Like this, Oh Soon-taek’s poetry showing the images of hearing and olfaction at the same time awake all things and make them live and breathe. There are fun as well as philosophy of life in the poet’s works. They open our eyes to forgotten realities and show freedom when feeling lightness from the materials offering happiness of small things. This is well expressed in Bell Sounds which hopes “all the sounds in the world will be pure like first cry of a newborn baby.” Sounds have no weight. Many things are put down, and then, there is a clean sound. How much this poem resounds! When reading the poet Oh Soon-taek’s poetry, our ears become clean. When we would rather hear it than read it through eyes, we seem to hear pure and bright sounds in the world. In addition, his collection of poems expressing love with fragrances contains lots of perfumes of flowers, grasses, and trees, awaking his readers’ olfactory sense. Someone says sounds last longest and fragrances last for a long and long time. His children’s poems reflecting universality of human emotions will be remembered as sounds or as fragrances to us.