"Meet me", says a lover, "with your several Tonṭi-like virtues", Tonṭi, being the great sea-port on the West Coast, the Tyndis of Ptolemy.13 Thus nearly every famous town or city of old has been pressed into service as term of comparison in a lover's language. The Tamils, therefore, idealized city life, but their love of cities interfered in no way with their love of Nature. Relief from the sameness of city life was provided for the Tamils by the festivals and water sports on sea and river, and pilgrimages to shrines located in spots of natural beauty, for Tamil religion, as we have seen, was engendered by the love of Nature, and at the time spread love for that from which it originated. Lucretius is eminently a philosopher but has occasionally intimated flashes and awe-inspiring landscapes to portray. Horace, said to be essentially a townsman, has many a line in praise of the country and his favourite rural haunts. But it is Vergil who ranks as the unfailing source of Nature poetry. He describes Nature, loves Nature, and sympathizes with Nature. To compare him with the Cankam poets is not too easy. The Cankam poets are conventional too as Vergil is conventional and imitates Theocritus in his Eclogues; they describe country life too but never so directly and so extensively as Vergil does in the Georgics. However, the same desire for accuracy, the same spirit of minute description and the same feeling for the manifestations of Nature occur all through Cankam literature. The long passages of regional description, for instance, in Malaipaṭukaṭaam may be profitably compared with a Georgic or two: This is the nature of the land (you have to traverse). The seeds that have been left on the earth grow by themselves just as the inhabitants would desire them to grow because of the torrential rain from clouds ripped open by lightning. In the spacious open grounds where there is abundant rain is the slender mucuntai creeper. It bears white blossoms which shine like the pleiads in the broad firmament. The sesamum that grows from the fields has pods like blue sapphires. In the adjoining forests dotted with ponds like waterpots, the pods |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 13Aink; 175. Cfr. K. N. Sivaraja Pillai, The Chronology of the Early Tamils, o.c, p. 98. |