do not turn red since they receive rain. They mature and become black, and turn so thick that a hand would not be able to hold more than seven of them. The seeds yield abundant oil. The panicum whose ears intertwine like the trunks of baby elephants that fight in sport is ready to be harvested. On their stubbles, the avarai with its sickle-shaped fruits, sheds its white flowers that resemble drops of curdled milk.14 |
Besides the tender similes and the long descriptions of Nature's scenes in the Aeneid, Vergil has a few passages where he shows that early in the life of Europe he apprehended a sense of sympathy between man and Nature. In the sixth book, the earth trembles and the mountains quake as if in dread of the approach of the Sibyl, and in the fourth book there is maintained throughout "a fine sympathy between the aspects of the outer-world and the passions which agitate the human actors". It is thus that he sets off the agitation within Dido's heart in contrast with the calm and silence of night: Night fell; weary creatures took quiet slumber all over earth, and woodland and wild waters had sunk to rest; now the stars wheel midway on their gliding path, now all the country is silent, and beasts and gay birds that haunt liquid levels of lake or thorny rustic thicket lay couched asleep under the still night. But not so the distressed Phoenician, nor does she ever sink asleep or take the night upon eyes or breast; her pain redoubles, and her love swells to renewed madness, as she tosses on the strong tide of wrath. (Aeneid, IV. 521-531). |
Effect by contrast as Vergil uses is one of the commonest devices in Cankam poetry by which Nature is the sympathetic stage and theatre for man. The Greeks and Romans too were noted for their love of leaves and flowers as the Tamils were, though they did not put them to such a variety of uses in daily life. Their shepherds too decked their heads with chaplets of leaves and flowers: Just apart lay the garlands slid from his head, and the heavy wine jar hung by its own worn handle. |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 14Malaipatu; 11. 99-110. |