“Beside a Chrysanthemum” (1947) is one of Suh Jung-ju’s most famous poems. It was originally published in his third collection of poetry, Selected Poems (1955), in which Suh tries to revisit traditional Korean sensibility, distancing himself from the Baudelairean art-for-art’s-sake vision of his first volume, Hwa-Sa-Jip (Flower and Snake Collection, 1941). Thus, the tone of serene contemplation and deep meditation prevails in this collection.

In particular, in “Beside a Chrysanthemum,” Suh, looking at a chrysanthemum, attains an intimation of the cosmic principle of life. Traditionally, a chrysanthemum has been a familiar symbol of integrity for a male Confucian scholar. A yellow chrysanthemum symbolized a golden principle—the loyalty to his ruler—that a scholar must exhibit no matter what. Thus, most scholars during the Chosun period of Korean history spent their leisure time drawing chrysanthemums with a calligraphic brush or composing poems about them.

Like his predecessors, Suh crafts a poem about a chrysanthemum; but, unlike Confucian scholars, he compares it to the female qualities of perseverance and maternal love. Thus, looking at a chrysanthemum, he is not reminded of a scholar’s promise of loyalty, but instead of his elder sister’s maturity.

Recalling Confucius’s dictum that forty is an age of spiritual maturity that enables an individual to overcome the raging hormones of the twenties and the anxiety and frustration of the thirties, Suh finds a chrysanthemum—which has finally bloomed after the coldness of winter, the freshness of spring, and the heat of summer—to be suggestive of his sister’s spiritual firmness. Like the flower, he imagines, she reached her full-flowered maturity only after she survived hope, dejection, fear, anger, and frustration.

At the same time, in the presence of the chrysanthemum, Suh is reminded of the Buddhist principle of cause and effect. In other words, for him, the flower’s bloom seems to be the end result of a collaboration of all related forces, here represented by a cuckoo who cried in the spring, the rolling thunder that rumbled in dark gray clouds in the summer, and the early frost that fell in the fall. Realizing that all these forces cooperated in giving a flower its transient but beautiful life, the poet suspects that his sleepless night might have also somehow participated in the flower’s bloom.

With his sister’s life and the cosmic power surrounding a chrysanthemum thus overlapped, Suh cannot help feeling awe toward the cosmic principle of life that connects all visible forms (appearances) and all invisible forces (reality) one to another. In the end, feeling humble in the presence of life, he cautiously hopes that he and his poetry do have a part in the immense network of life.

Works Cited

McCann, David R., editor. Selected Poems of So˘ Cho˘ngju. Columbia University Press, 1989.

Suh, Jung-ju. “Beside a Chrysanthemum.” The Silence of Love: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry, edited by Sammy E. Solberg, translated by Peter Lee, p. 122, University of Hawaii Press, 1990.

Categories: British Literature, Korean Literature, Literature

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