CHAPTER THREE

POETIC CONVENTIONS

Concept of Nature

The physiographical lay-out of Tamil Naad, its flora and fauna, its hills and valleys, rivers and lakes, its deserts and sandy beaches, formed the basis for a considerable portion of Tamil poetic convention. The influence of Nature as obtained in the Tamil land on poetry was final and far-reaching and very decisive. Tamil poetry bears in nearly every page the imprint of the land and the landscape in which it has been created. Convention, evolved much earlier than the epoch which produced the literature we are examining, had divided the Tamil land into five regions, or rather convention had noted that the Tamil land contained five different kinds of natural landscape. It happens that the entire earth may be divided into these five regions, and it was the fortune of the Tamil to find diverse physiographical and climatic characteristics of the earth on a miniature scale within the boundaries of his native-land. He observed that the mountain region, the pasture-lands, the maritime tracts, the agricultural region, and the temporary dry, waterless arid patches, differed considerably from one another in their contours, in their vegetation, and in the manner of life that man had to evolve in each region. He named each region after its most characteristic flower, and also stated the psychological and emotional patterns of behaviour that would be appropriate to each region. He, therefore, made poetry, both akam and puṛam, love poetry and non-love poetry, subordinate to this five-fold division and ordained that poetic themes were to have a definite geographical environment as their background, and the imagery for each theme was to be taken from objects belonging to its appropriate region and from none other. The classification was valid for the “sea girt world” (Tolkaappiyam, 948).

If enmity between two chiefs had ended in one capturing