Yun Dong Ju's Poems: Humility and Modesty Before Nature

This study deals with ecological consciousness in the poems of Yun, Dong Ju to suggest that the recovery of ecological moral sensibility can be a useful device to solve the environmental crisis we are facing now. In Yun's poems, Nature is a mirror to clarify his identity, a fixed principle to guide his life, a great Cause for living, and even provides him for ars poetica. Seemingly, his poetic imagination lies in the Romantic tradition. But his attitude toward Nature is different from the Romantic one in that he is always on the strict alert against assuming a haughty attitude toward his great master, Nature. In his poems, the humility and modesty before Nature is activated and reinforced by his feeling ashamed of himself before Nature. The shame which acts as a catalyst for removing anthropocentric consciousness from him or human beings, is another expression of, what Arne Naess called, Self-realization which means the realization of organic wholeness. In the Deep Ecological point of view, the purity and authenticity in Yun's poems arise from the achievement of the ecological egalitarianism that man also exists as one of many other species on earth. Yun's poems show us what is the core of the ecological ethics and suggest how to recover ecological moral sensibility for the symbiosis in Nature. We have taken it for granted that the happiness and value of human beings are prior to those of any other things on the earth. Seen from the human history, we clearly know how difficult it is for the strong to renounce their interests. Yun's poems, with a conscientious and close eyes on the world, feel ashamed of the hubris of man and awakes us the fact that both human and non-human beings all have the same ground for living. His ecological perspective is simple but suggests the most fundamental and essential solution for the present environmental problem; the solution is to start from the remorse of man for devastating the weak and Nature, which means the recovery of the environmental moral sensibility, or ecocentric environmental ethic. As seen in Yun's poems, a small activity of our feeling ashamed of ourself before Nature triggers the harmonious lives of all human or non-human beings on earth.