(god, flora, fauna, music, occupation), found in or related to these regions, but he had as well to know what changes were introduced into these regions by the annual seasons, and how Nature manifested herself by day and night during these seasons. Thus the Tamil poet could ill-afford to neglect the study of landscape as seen during each of the six seasons of the Tamil year and during the six major divisions of the Tamil day.5 It has been already noted that Nature is featured as the setting for poetry in a different manner in the two classes of poetry, akam and puṛam. Akam poetry deals with imaginary situations based on actual life.6 The poet may imagine himself to be bard of a queen conveying a message to the king in his encampment and narrating the sorrows of separation, and urging him to end the war victoriously to hasten back to his capital. Or he may imagine himself to be in the place of the hero, or the heroine, or the maid to the heroine, or her nurse, or her mother, and write poems as they would have written. The Tamil poet had at the same time to cultivate a dramatic element; and a power to characterize imaginary situations and compose poems in the name of the characters prescribed by convention. Hence, in the editions of poems that have come down to us, each poem has a colophon, inserted later by commentators to say to which category the poem belongs, and whose words or reflections are supposed to be contained in the poem. Thus the first poem of Akanaanuuṛu is entitled paalai meaning that the subject is separation of lovers and that the poem is to have a desert landscape as its setting. The colophon runs: “What a heroine said to her maid when she (the heroine) was unable to bear the grief of being separated from her lover”. No names, however, of hero or heroine or other personages concerned in the plot, were to be mentioned in the poem. But the poet always writes in the first person, even when impersonating a character of the opposite sex. Thus in Tamil love-poetry one does not come across the direct ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5 M. VENKADASAMY NATTAR, Kapilar (Tm), p. 31 ff, Trichinopoly, 1939. 6 T. 999. See Naccinaarkiniyar’s and S.S. Bharati’s commentaries in h. 1. |