பக்கம் எண் :


116 LANDSCAPE AND POETRY 

barrenness of the major part of the land which does not provide such amenities to the wayfarer.

The topic of love of which the desert landscape formed the background is "separation and related states". Under this head came the fears, pangs and sorrows at the thought of separation or separation de facto. The heroine manifesting her aversion to separation, the nurse urging on the hero to desist from his journey or to take his beloved along with him on his journey, the journey of the two lovers unknown to the heroine's parents and relatives, the search for them conducted by the mother and nurse, their bemoaning the elopement of the heroine, the fears of the two lovers themselves that the heroine's people might overtake them in their flight from home for the purpose of separating them, the observations of those that meet the lovers during the flight, are the situations of love dealt with by paalai poetry.51 The ocean too was considered as paalai.

The course of true love was never smooth, and these sorrows so bitter to the lovers were appropriately represented by the desert. The thought of separation itself is sufficient to make the heart seem a desert. The sorrowing girl has figuratively no shade under which she might rest. Her weariness, her sigh "like the smith's bellows", her inward being, dreary and parched, found no better region than the desert to which it could be likened.

Nature as described in paalai contains the most lurid descriptions of dread and desolation. The sun sends its scorching rays like a cruel sovereign. The tanks and lakes are so dry that even bird and beast endure untold hardships. Trees are all so scorched by the heat that their leaves have dried or they have lost all their greenness. The vaakai tree with its pods adds to the luridity of the landscape. There is hardly any shade under which the weary wayfarers might rest, or hardly a puddle where they might quench their thirst. With scorching heat from above, scorching heat below their feet, scorching heat within their hearts, they look upon a prospect that is a picture of desolation.52

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   51 Paalai = Wrightia tinctoria. See K.KOTHANDAPANI, Vada Venkatam in Tamil Culture, Vol. IX (1961), pp. 65-92.

   52Akam; 87, 89.