SANSKRIT POETRY .* A HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 3
artificial here. Every thought springs naturally from the life which the poets led or beheld around them. So rich is this poetry in metaphor and allegory that it requires little effort on my part to show wherein its excellence lies. Nature is here presented to us suffused in a continual light of the poet’s fancy whose power we feel not only in the bold personifications but also in the refreshing pictures of the physical aspects of the Dawn. Such imaginative renderings of nature cannot fail to give us that peculiar joy for which we almost instinctively go to works of art. We shall present- ly see what this joy signifies. But the point on which I like to lay special stress now is that this poetry has for its theme the beauty of nature and, although its appeal to emotion is undoubted , it does not make emotion its subject-matter.
By the side of these sacred hymns there must very early have sprung up secular poetry in the shape of epic tales and battle songs. There is allusion in ancient Sanskrit literature to the practice of professional minstrels entertaining ever-ready listeners in courts and hermitages by reciting such poetry to the accompaniment of music. It is poetry of this kind that should have furnished the chief material to the later epic writers and the Mahabharata in particular should have been built up largely out of such songs. We have a few fragments of this secular poetry, preserved in the Rgveda itself, dealing with subjects like social customs, the liberal- ity of patrons and so forth. These fragments also exhibit a mythological colouring implying thereby that the work of the lay artist at first resembled that of his brother, the religious bard, and either described the beauty of nature or recounted the outward activities of man. But in course of time a far-reaching change was introduced which gradually altered the very complexion of Indian poetry. We get a clue to the character of this change in the well- known story which is related at the beginning of the Ramayana regarding the birth of Indian classical poesy. The circumstances associated with this event are attractive enough to bear reiteration. Valmlki, a great sage of Kosala, was thinking of describing in a worthy manner the fortunes of Rama, the divine hero of his country. Revolving this idea in his mind, he, one day went as usual to the river Tamasa to perform his mid-day ablutions. But on that day it so happened that he saw in the vicinity of the river a fowler killing one of a pair of lovely birds that were disporting themselves on the branch of a tree. The fowler singled out the male bird and brought
