Shepherds of Arcady, deck with ivy your rising poet, that Codrus may burst his gall with envy; or if he praise beyond my meed, bind my brows with foxglove, lest an evil tongue harm the bard to be. | Alcides takes most delight in the poplar, Iacchus in the wine, fair Venus in the myrtle, Phoebus in his own bay tree; Phyllis loves hazels: While Phyllis loves them, neither shall myrtle excel the hazels, nor Phoebus bay. | (Ec. VII) |
Catullus, writer of Latin love-poetry, addressed his love, Lesbia, directly and was bound by no poetic convention. It is impossible to know of the personal feelings of the Tamil poets except in their puṛam poetry. Even in puṛam some of the poems partake of the nature of "group-poetry" and give little room for the personal note.15 We shall never know whether Kapilar and Paraṇar are writing their own experiences or exercising their powers of imagination and dramatization in their love-lyrics. We shall never know directly from poetry the name of a single lover of the Cankam age, for conventions forbade any indication by which the actors of the drama of love might be identified. One misses in Cankam poetry the direct, intimate, personal addresses to Nature and to lovers, and the descriptions of Nature, pure and simple, that one finds in the poetry of other epochs and other nations. Cankam poetics has given the world some of its best and singular Nature Poetry, but it also appears to have restricted and limited poetic inspiration to a certain extent. English Poetry The Vergilian tradition in the poetic interpretation of Nature runs through the English Literature that followed the Renaissance.16 Chaucer and Spencer have the May-morning freshness of a new literature, but it is Shakespeare who attracts us in our comparative study, for as a dramatist he used ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 15 T. P. MEENAKSHISUNDARAM, The Theory of Cankam Poetry, in Tamil Culture, Vol. I, No. I, p. 41. 16 J. INGRAM BRYANT, The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry, Tokyo, 1932; F. W.MOORMAN, The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry from Beowulf to Shakespeare, pp. 215-239, Strassburg, 1915. |