the poet, though he may make full use of the discoveries of science. His is the study of the beauty of the universe. But of this beauty he studies not merely the bare appearances, the contours of the hills, the colours of the sunset and the rainbow; he does not merely express the sensuously beautiful in rhythmic language. He enters deeper into the secrets of Nature and examines Nature’s relationship with man. His poetic outlook is different also from the outlook of the philosopher, for while the latter’s attention is focussed on truth, the former concentrates his vision on beauty. Though ancient Tamil poetry includes lines of a deeply philosophic nature, and though Tamil poets off and on revel in details more natural to scientific treatises on botany or biology, Tamil poetry is never without a close association with beauty as related to man and human action in short, without clothing nature in the hues of human passion.4 Stages have been marked out in the progressive appreciation of Nature by man. The earliest stage is that of the mere organic feeling of pleasure at the manifestations of Nature that please as sunshine and gentle showers of rain, and pain at those that hurt as chilling wind and driving snow. In Shairp’s words it is “that simple, spontaneous, unreflecting pleasure which all unsophisticated beings feel in free open-air life”, such fresh child-like delight in Nature as is found in Chaucer and Spenser. Next to this comes the appreciation of the physically beneficent forces in Nature, and those recognized as conducive to utility. Still higher in the scale occurs the point where the sympathetic interpretation of Nature ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4 J.C. SHAIRP, On the Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 15, New York, 1877: What is that aspect of Nature, that truth of the External World, with which poetry has more immediately to do. To put it in the simplest way: it is Beauty, that strange and wonderful entity with which all creation is clothed as with a garment, or rather I should say pervaded and penetrated as by a subtle essence, inwrought into its inmost fibre. The Poet is the man to whom is given the eye that sees this more instinctively, the heart that feels it more intensely, than other men do; and who has the power to express it and bring it home to his fellow-men. |