Poetry in a phrase !

Poetry in a phrase !

Poetry can happen even without words. If so, no wonder, poetry can happen even in only one word.

But nobody can doubt that poetry can happen in a phrase. Such phrasal poetic flashes are abundant in Sangam lore. One example we will see.

You are sitting in your garden house. It is calm, honeyed isolation. Surrounding trees chatter some age old jokes, which the wind recognizes.

The sheen of sprayed light, the skin of emergent twilight and the returning calls of the home-coming birds make the evening wine-dipped.

You fix your gaze on a branch. It is odd, the curves and the bends and the swirling botanical gustos. One parrot is sweetly repetitive. You wonder why. Perhaps to relieve you of the mystery, a squirrel sits in a lower branch, being tutored by the parrot for some uncertain future symphony. It is not there, the reasons, in the creatures' minds. But the poetry links it so. The parrot and the squirrel make an ideal tutor and the taught. What the parrot says, the squirrel tries to repeat in many unsuccessful attempts. It looks so in the poet's eyes. He expresses it in a phrase, so beautifully, in akanAnURu. 12

kiLi viLi payiRRum veLil Adu perunchinai

a parrot teaching a squirrel

the sequence of calls

on a wide branch of tree

(veLil - squirrel)

The scholars who have translated this line so far, including my friend Prof A Dakshinamurthy, have overlooked this poetry, which is there in the natural sequence of words. Instead they have gone around to draw meaning more congenial to the common sense as - the parrots mistakenly thinking the calls of the girls in the ranches as the calls of their own kind and the squirrels dancing - which goes too way afar to make the Sangam poet look so prosaic, whereas the line in its natural order evoke a terrible sense of poetry in a serene mood.

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Srirangam V Mohanarangan

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