CHAPTER TWO LIFE AND NATURE Earlier Contact with Nature Nature and the poetic interpretation of Nature are terms which are better known than defined. However, Nature has been defined as the outer world of sense perception which is not man nor the immediate work of man. The word “Nature” has been used in preference to “landscape” in contexts like the present, because landscape is far too concerned with contours, colour and grouping to take into account the relation of the natural world to the poet and to his interpretations.1 The poet’s interest in the natural world is not the same as the interest of the agriculturist or the scientist. A farmer’s interest in Nature, as Ruskin and others have observed, is very pronounced in the Odyssey, and may be traced in the very early literature of every people including that of the Tamils.2 Such an interest is centred rather around the utility than the sublimity and beauty of the universe, and this kind of interest continues even in the poetry of later eras. As a characteristic example of this interest among the Greeks, their emphasis on the useful, may be taken the words of Pallas to Ulysses: This Ithaca of ours is indeed a rough country enough, and not good for driving in; but, still things might be worse; it has plenty of corn, and good wine, and always rain, and soft nourishing dew, and it has good feeding for goats and oxen, and all manner of wood, and springs fit to drink at all the year round.3 |
Nor is the examination of cause and effect the purpose of ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 FREDERIC W.MOORMAN, The Interpretation of Nature in English poetry from Beowulf to Shakespeare, p. 2 f, Strassburg, 1905. 2 JOHN RUSKIN, Modern Painters, Vol. III, Ch. XIII, “Of Classical Landscape.” 3Odyssey, XIII, p. 236 ff. |