A Poem Written Easily
(쉽게 씌어진 시)

This work shows the poet's ambivalence about where he is at in his life as he studied in japan as a foreign student. Starting with his own room, which never feels like a true home for him, he muses about one thing after another while it is drizzling outside on a quiet night.

He calls his calling, that of a poet, a sad one, and thinks about the folks back home who just sent him a letter of love with the tuition for his school, which reminds him of the hard work that went in produce it. While he appreciates it very much, he also can't help the doubt that creeps in, as to whether what he's doing is all truly worthwhile, like going to a lecture given by an old professor, or losing touch with his childhood buddies in the midst of all this. He feels like he is sinking down all by himself. He then makes the eponymous self-referential remark about how the way he writes this little poem feels vain and shameful when put next to the hard challenges of life itself. It is of course an ironic line, as coming up with these condensations of emotion was anything but easy -- it must have been a rather painful process, a mental uprooting of his whole being in a way.

As usual, though, he collects himself not losing all hope. He dispels the darkness as best as he could, and looks ahead to the morning that will arrive (which was in fact just three years away), in a somber mood in which he refers to himself as the last of me, Then in the last line he calls all this a handshake of tear and consolation, which tells us what kind of emotional ups and downs he was going through. Yes, looking back is always easy, as it is for us as we read his work, but when all you can see ahead of you is pure darkness as it was for Yun, you feel the infinite weight that crushes you. It would be closer to the truth to say that Yun wrote it squeezing out every last drop of his mental energy. The title of the very opposite sense tells us how difficult it actually was.