of distant deer. The transferred epithet is particularly pointed.54 Another set of poems, may be classified as aiming at literary effect by the device of contrast, a device that is most common in Tamil poetry. The poets compare the heroine at home amid the beauty of surroundings like the garden and the bower strewn with soft sand, with the horrors of the jungle and desert, the ground strewn with flints and the unbearable heat through which she will have to traverse with her lover to reach his distant country.55 The separated hero in his solitude in the forest often thinks of what the heroine would be suffering because of his absence. Sometimes in his travel he happens to pass by a village or an oasis where Nature is lovelier, or which has transformed overnight because of some rain that has fallen, and he compares the sense of calm and quiet content in outward Nature with the desolation that is in their hearts: Darkness-yet-lingering Dawn. Buffaloes are at large, swarms of bees resound around the branches of the Murukku, aflame with dense clusters of unfolding buds. Ploughmen drive their teams through the fields and into the orchards of cloddy earth; all the air with trained oxen's clear urge doth resound; and the stumpy glebe breaks beneath their furrow. The wood itself is bedecked with the bouquets on yonder trees. At this eye's festive hour, how fareth it with my beloved? Before me parted, she was in bloom; now forlorn, is such her grief that her shoulder slim? She, my beauteous brunette, with beauty spots like leaves on which hath flowed honey from cool, scented flowers, haunts of gossamer-winged bees.56 |
This poem does not contain the "appropriate theme" of the desert, neither its flora nor fauna. However, it is conventionally classified under paalai because separation is its fundamental theme. In this manner under paalai poetry several other regions are also described. This is what Naccinaarkkiniyar would have termed "Paalai in Marutam" Among such poems which contain the descriptions of other regions but dwell on separation as their principal theme and are therefore classified as paalai, occur a number of poems in which the hero ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 54Akam; 147; Compare with Kalidasa's Ritu-Samhara, Canto I. |