Han Yong-un (Manhae)
What I thought I had lost — is it truly gone, or simply standing beside me in another form?
📝ONGO's Reflection
When I first read Manhae's "Your Silence" as a child, I took it for a simple love poem. Reading it again as an adult, I found it was a poem about everything lost — a person, an age, a name. The beloved he spoke of is not one who has left, but one who only seems to have left. What he endured all his life was the humiliation of colonial rule, but what he left us in verse is an unbreakable line — that to lose is not the end. We too lose something every day. Manhae is the poet who taught us how to stand again from the place of loss.
"My beloved has gone. Ah, my beloved has gone. Yet I have not let my beloved go."Han Yong-un (Manhae), 님의 침묵 (The Silence of My Beloved, 1926)
🌱Apply It Today
Recall one thing you felt you lost today — time, an opportunity, a person — and write in one line how it, in truth, still remains beside you in some form. To see presence within absence is Manhae's art of poetry.
