徐居正의 漢詩 속에 수용된 蘭草의 性格과 意味

Characters and Meanings of Orchids Adopted in Seo Geojeong s Classical Chinese Poems

Flowers function as the origin of mankind s universal aesthetic consciousness. It is because mankind has perceived and is perceiving flowers as various aesthetic symbols. Like such, as flowers that are perceived as the origin of aesthetic sense or of aesthetic symbol function as the subject of mankind s culture and arts, they have been extending the boundary of aesthetic sense or of aesthetic symbol. Throughout the history of Korean literature, it is not easy to point out the beginning in which a literary piece expressed aesthetic senses or described aesthetic symbols through flowers. However, through currently remaining literary pieces, symbols, images derived from the symbols, and their aesthetic senses can be analogized. Although the literary description of flower was a general phenomenon in literary creation, however, it is hard to say that all kinds of flowers became objects of literary pieces. It is believed that the reason is because Korean people facing flowers pay more attention to the symbolic meanings and values of flowers than flowers beauty itself. While it cannot be said our ancestors did not pay attention to flowers exterior and physical beauty such as colors, appearances, and aromas, it seems that they set the ethical and moral standards to evaluate flowers and applied such standards to judge the goodness or badness of each flower. In accordance with such understandings about flowers, our ancestors categorized plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo as si-jun-zi(sa-gunja; four gracious plants), and recognized them as the most gracious among flowers and plants. However, such ideological literary evaluations have a serious problem that flowers which should be the purely ornamental objects of admiration became evaluated and perceived by ethical and moral standards. This paper is to analyzes the poems Sagajeong Seo Geojeong(1420 ~1488) wrote about orchids which our ancestors generally took for the objects of literary creation, and to understand the characters and meanings of orchids in them. This paper tries to examine the characters and meanings of orchids in Seo Geojeong s poems not only due to his character as a literati-bureaucrat but also because it is believed that he is the author of the most remaining poems regarding orchids. The result of examination thinks that even orchids in Seo Geojeong s classical Chinese poems are also used to realize the contents of a priori learning based on ideological symbolism. In order to generalize such literary adoptions of orchids, it should be clarified if other flowers and plants in Seo Geojeong s poems have similar characters like orchids and if orchids in other poets poetic pieces have similar aspects like those of Seo Geojeong’s. For these questions, deeper discussions are planned in the future.