디지털텍스트를 통한 조지 허버트의 모양시 읽기와 가르치기

Reading and Teaching George Herbert’s Figure Poems via Interactive Digital Texts

As a part of the interdisciplinary project that aims to combine technology and the humanities, this paper explores a way to read and teach George Herbert’s figure poems by creating an interactive digital text. This paper explores the possibility of using digital texts as educational means for Korean students to concentrate on the visual imagery of poetic language. The significance of imagery in reading poetry is discussed in the first part of paper, in the context of the long tradition of the picture theory of poetry, emblem books, iconology, and Renaissance interest in the materiality of language. The second part analyzes Herbert’s poems to demonstrate how the conflict between meaning and image in his poems can be digitally rendered. Herbert is perhaps the most visual among metaphysical poets: in his figure poems such as “The Altar” or “Easter Wings” the stanza form simply adopts the visual form of the poem’s title; and in his hieroglyphic poems such as “The Pulley” and “The Windows” a visual form emerges as the unifying focus of our reading. Indeed, Herbert regards his poem as a meeting point of divine vision and verbal signs, meaning and images. Yet, there exists a strange disruption in Herbert's poemswhen the poet becomes uncertain whether his visual images are used for self-display and may blur the divine vision. The latter part of this paper analyzes “The Altar” and explores how the poem can be re-made into an interactive digital text that can make students more aware of this disruption in the poem’s visual imagery. The first word of the poem, “broken,” suggests that the image of altar we see in the stanza form is not the altar the poet/repentant rears in the poem. Just as the poet/repentant desperately tries to build the altar with broken pieces of his heart, students are asked to put each word in the right order in the digital text to complete the poem. If a student fails to put the right word in the right position, the altar shape of the poem falls apart, creating a terrible sense of disruption. Unless the meaning is understood, the image cannot hold. Our digital text is a simple model of viewer-activated poem, compared to more sophisticated digital poems that use various interactive visual and sonic techniques. Yet, used as a supplement to the printed text, it can enable our students to become more conscious of Herbert’s poetic struggle as well as the strongly visual aspects of his poetry.