The Letter of July

The sun of July smells a young lion
The sun of July smells a rose
Hope to cut the sun in the size of a tray and hung it around the neck
Hope to run in the grassland by cart and sear the heart freshly

In July, many people want to go away somewhere to fully enjoy freedom. At the same time, they are worried that they may endure the summer in the sizzling sun. Of numerous poems portraying this season of excitement and worry, Park Du-jin’s poem ‘The Letter of July’ finds an echo in the hearts of readers.

Park Du-jin always sang communion with nature as a member of a poet’s group, Cheongrokpa, after he published a joint collection of poetry『Cheongrok-jip』(청록집) together with two other poets Jo Ji-hoon and Park Mok-wol. Cheongrok refers to a bluish-green color. He walked the path of a truth-seeker until he stopped writing, containing his determination and thoughts in nature to express them through poetry.

Dreaming of a Youthful, Beautiful day

Park Du-jin was born in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province on March 10th, 1916, as the son of a peasant. The region had vast farmland and was rich in natural resources. But the country’s rice bowl was prone to exploitation during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea. Most villagers ended up leading weary lives as peasant farmers.

In his prose, Park later recalled his hometown as ‘a miserable hell where people were all skin and bones, subsisting on scarce grassroots and tree barks.’ In his childhood, he lived mainly on millet broth, which was so thin that it reflected his face like a mirror. But the boy cherished a dream for literature while attending a village school to study Chinese classics and that dream stayed with him in elementary school.

He would often climb up to Cheongryong(청룡) Mountain overlooking the Charyeong(차령) Mountains coiling around the village and rolling away to a distant horizon. There, he would watch the rising sun and dreamed of a youthful, beautiful day when he would finally cast away his despair and sorrow.

Cheongrokpa Poet

Park worked at the Anseong County Office when he was a teenager. He moved to another job at a publishing firm in Seoul at the age of 19. He taught himself literature before starting his literary career as a poet in 1939.

He entered the literary circles with other poets, Jo Ji-hoon and Park Mok-wol, on the recommendation of renowned poet Jeong Ji-yong, who was the member of the literary magazine [Sentence].

At the time, Jeong highly praised Park’s poems, which he said released a scent of plants in the forests and made readers feel religious ecstasy. Attracting special attention from the world of poetry, Park released some of his finest poems to live up to expectations.

Various forms of nature, such as skies, trees, seas and flowers, appear in his poems but he illustrated them at a supernatural level to criticize the artistry-centered poetic trend that prevailed in the 1930s. He published a joint collection of poetry “Cheongrok-jip” in 1946 with Jo Ji-hoon and Park Mok-wol. In the collection, Park embodied Koreans’ spirit of resistance and national identity in nature, during the later years of Japanese colonization.

Park sought to discover the lost source of human life and tradition of history in nature, rather than escaping to nature from the reality, in order to encourage those suffering in the literary dark ages at the time.

Containing Determination in Poetry

As the so-called Cheongrokpa poet, Park served as a steppingstone linking Korean poetry before the nation’s liberation of Japanese colonial rule and the one in the post-liberation era. He upheld purity of poetry and presented the right path of poetry. In 1949, he published his first collection of poems [The Sun], which included his famous poem with the same title.

Rise, rise, the sun. With your bright and beautiful face, rise, the sun.
Over the hills, over the hills, cleaving the darkness all night
With your youthful, beautiful face, rise, the blazing sun

This poem was written amid the overflowing joy of national liberation from Japanese colonialism during such turbulent times. It represents the evolution of the poet who began to take an active interest in the reality and history of his country. Park later went through social and political upheaval, such as the Korean War, the April 19th democracy protests of 1960 and the May 16th military coup in 1961. His later poems such as [The Spider and the Constellation] and [Human Jungle] encourage participation in reality and sing freedom and justice passionately.

Park nurtured more than 50 poets while lecturing in college for 40 years before he passed away from a chronic disease on September 16th, 1998. He was 82. He naturally accepted the fact that he was getting old, as he said “As I grow older, it feels like I can write poems as I wish.” He is a true poet of nature, of determination.