Death Poem
Yi Gae wrote the following death poem in prison before his execution:
방안에 혔는 촛불 눌과 이별하엿관대
겉으로 눈물지고 속타는 줄 모르는다.
우리도 천리에 임 이별하고 속타는 듯하여라.
Oh, candlelight shining the room, with whom did you part?
You shed tears without and burn within, yet no one notices.
We part with our Lord thousand miles away and burn like thee.
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Famous quotes containing the words death and/or poem:
“Liberal hopefulness
Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.”
—William Empson (1906–1984)
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.