Azaleas
A speaker tells the woman who is leaving him that when she goes, sick of the sight of him, he will let her go without a word, and will gather armfuls of azaleas from Yaksan hill at Yeongbyeon to strew on the road ahead of her, asking only that she tread them lightly as she goes. The refusal to weep is stated flatly and then repeated, and that is the whole of the argument. Kim Sowol, dead at thirty-two, set the seven-five beat of Korean folk song against the free verse then arriving by way of Japan, and the result is the most widely memorized text in modern Korea.
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Attributes
Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 63% · 8 shared
- 61% · 9 shared
- 59% · 9 shared
- 59% · 9 shared
- 59% · 8 shared
- 59% · 7 shared