Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/422

 However that may be, he solved the difficulty by leaping over the mud wall that separated them and gained her promise to become his wife, which promise she fulfilled after he had led an army against the usurper and driven him from the throne.

Korean poetry is all of a lyric nature. There is nothing in the nature of an epic. The language does not lend itself to that form of expression. It is all nature music, pure and simple. It is all passion, sensibility, emotion. It deals with personal, domestic, even trivial matters oftentimes, and for this reason it may be called narrow. But we must remember that their horizon is. pitifully circumscribed. If they lavish a world of passion on a trivial matter, it is because in their small world these things are relatively great. The swaying of a willow bough, the erratic flight of a butterfly, the falling of a petal, the droning of a passing bee, means more to a Korean, perhaps, than to one whose life is broader.

Here we have the fisherman's song as he returns from hiswork at night :

In the following we find a familiar strain. It is the Korean setting of "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"