resemblances in Nature imagery between Sanskrit and Tamil poetry and Western poetry. Certain common climatic features as well as common flora and fauna (the mango, the jasmine, the elephant, the deer), and mutual influences, originally not of great moment, but gradually growing, are reasons for the resemblances which emerge between Tamil nature poetry and Sanskrit nature poetry. These resemblances are seen in the figures of speech drawn from nature, in the descriptions of female and male beauty, and in the mythological and folkloristic descriptions of nature, for instance, of the mountains as the breasts of Mother Earth, of the female face as the moon, or of clouds as elephants. Common attitudes are also seen in the description of the season of spring, but the basic concept and interpretation of Nature in Cankam poetry differs considerably from nature poetry in Sanskrit. The greater part of the Ŗg Veda consists of religious lyrics, only the tenth book contains some secular poems. Arthur A. Macdonell says in his History of Sanskrit Literature: "The hymns of the Ŗg Veda being mainly invocations of the gods, their contents are largely mythological. It is sufficiently primitive to enable us to see clearly the process of personification by which natural phenomena developed into gods. Never observing, in his ordinary life, action or movement not caused by an acting or moving person, the Vedic Indian, like man in a much less advanced state, still refers such occurrences in Nature to personal agents, which to him are inherent in the phenomena. He still looks out upon the workings of Nature with childlike astonishment. One poet asks why the sun does not fall from the sky; another wonders where the stars go by day; while a third marvels that the waters of all rivers constantly flowing into it never fill the ocean".3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ inter-connection between idea and idea-'a lot of little pieces of string', as the schoolboy ruefully put it, 'all tied together in one enormous knots. But literary knots, when skilfully tied, serve a valuable purpose. By their very complexity they focus the mind of the logical interplay of ideas and it was to their precise grasp of logical relationships that the Greeks owed the unique clarity of their thought". |
3 ARTHUR A. MACDONELL, History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 67, London, 1924. |