gifts, saying that the gossip was more resounding than the shouts with which the foes of his hero retreated in battle, or louder than the jubilant cries of his patron’s soldiers when they cut down the “guarded tree” of his enemy. Or the allusion may be directly to historic exploits performed by the great heroes in the past.³

Apart from the purely historical allusions, Cankam literature contains also numerous passages in which the poets associate landscape with historical events and historical persons. This historical association in nature poetry is also to be found among poets like Vergil. English poets have used it in poems here and there. Byron’s Childe Harold contains many passages where landscape evokes thoughts and reflections on the past, and Scott is famous for seeing his landscape always through historical association. The Tamil poets also saw the earth coloured by this historical association, but their manner of expressing historical association is worth noting.

The tresses of the heroine have a fragrance that floats in the breeze. The fragrance reminds the poet of the fresh sweet smell that emanates from parks and jungles on a morning when the mullai is in bloom, and forthwith he compares the fragrance of the tresses to the fragrance of the forest-reserve of one of his patrons, say Oori:

The tresses of a heroine are compared sometimes to a flourishing river. The poet would compare them to the side bank of not any city, but often to the wavy sand dunes along the dry bank of a river, but one that the poet would like to extol, say the ford of the Kaaveeri at Uṛantai, the capital of the Cooḷas, or the banks of the Vaiyai near Kuuṭal.⁴

Potiyil, one of the peaks of the Western Ghats stands like a lofty sentinel in the southern portion of the range. The

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   ³Kur; 328; 393; Akam; 36; 45; 209; 253; 256.

   ⁴Puram; 347, 5-6.