Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Enchanted gardens : June 04, 2000

---

Poetic images

Gowri Ramnarayan

"A garden is a lovesome thing . . ." intones the poet. But at other moments, he hits a darker mood on the same spot.

Prem Kapoor/Fotomedia

It is intriguing to note that literature in any part of the globe has mixed feelings about gardens. Take this Mexican rhyme where a child is afraid that the high garden walls "holding up the sky will never let the clouds get by". Notions of confinement, even disdain for simple domestic contentment, shade the garden image.

Poetry seems to revel more in the wild woods than in tended bowers, preferring Dionysian chaos to Apollonian order. And if it does enter gardens and parks, there are means to break free. One of them is fantasy, like silver bells, cockle shells and pretty maids in "quite contrary" Mary's garden in Mother Goose land. This is the realm of Arabian Nights' dreams, of fairy tales where adventure begins in the frontyard, but takes you up the beanstalk into the skies; or across the seven seas, when the theft of garden apples made a prince pursue the firebird in a German saga.

Wordsworth celebrates nature in hills and glades, but does describe the linnet from an orchard seat. At other times a real garden launches a reverie, nostalgia - or becomes the sanctuary for the soul-in-ferment. John Keats recalls the house where he was born by its garden of roses, violets, lilies, and

"The lilac where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday -
The tree is living yet!"

We know that hearing a nightingale in his garden inspired Keats to delve into despair, ranging through Greek myths, Biblical tales, the English woods and Provencal meadows. Looking over the railings in Battersea Park through the November fog, George Barker moans that he spent his "winters in summer's disappointments." W. B. Yeats confides that he met his love down by the "salley gardens".

"She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on trees,
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree...
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs,
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears."

Many poets, like William Morris, have "a little garden close". Would to God he were there again beholding "her feet upon the grass" as before. Austin Dobson too prays for that "sequestered close, a quiet resting place" adding,

"Grant, O garden-god, that I,
Now that none profane is nigh,
Now that mood and moment please,
Find the fair Pierides!"

Lovely women were compared to wild flowers, but the garden rose remains unrivalled. Campion announced:

"There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies
blow . . .
There cherries grow that none may buy,
Till Cherry-Ripe themselves do cry."

Wotton asks the proud violets (lesser beauties), "What are you when the Rose (his mistress) is blown?" Waller sent the rose as love's messenger, Burns exulted that his "luve's like a red, red rose", and Herrick admonished the coy maiden to gather her "rosebuds" before she became too old for love. Blake pitied the sick rose devoured by the worm.

While royal gardens, whether in France, or in India under the Mughals, have witnessed romances/intrigues recorded in history and poetry, fictitious gardens have staged dramas of every kind - from the bursting into bloom of the Asoka tree at the touch of a beauteous damsel's foot ("Malavikagnimitram"), to murder most foul of the sleeping king ("Hamlet"). Let's not forget that Valmiki's epic unfolds its most striking scenes in the pleasure garden of Asokavana.

Western myths depict gardens as places of serene beauty, inaccessible to mortals. They may spell danger to the unwary. In one of his labours, Hercules forces the Old Man of the Sea to disclose the location of the Garden of Hesperides, and tricks the slow-witted Atlas into fetching the golden apples there under serpent protection. Perseus undergoes many tests before flying into the sacred grove of the Muses to tap the fountain Hippocrene. Jason has to muster a fleet of heroes to reach Colchis, and get the sorceress Medea's aid to capture the golden fleece which hangs on a dragon-guarded tree in a noirish garden.

The garden as a macabre place is best exemplified in the tale of Proserpina, kidnapped by Pluto. Eating pomegranate seeds in the garden of the underworld disqualifies her from escape. Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine" images that wasteland.

"Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs."

In contrast, Solomon's song finds gentle romance in "My beloved has gone down . . . To feed in the gardens and to gather lilies." But of course, the most famous garden of them all is located in Eden. In "Paradise Lost" John Milton insists that it was not laid out with "nice art" in "curious knots" but "nature boon poured forth profusely on hill and dale and plain". God had thrown a mountain as his "garden mould", and a fountain with many rills, amidst the luxuriance of bird-filled trees. The tree of knowledge and the serpent link us to Hesperides. In fact, the two legends have continued to sprout similar gardens and deeds in literatures throughout the world, even in modern classics like the Narnia legends of C. S. Lewis.

T. S. Eliot invites us to enter the first world ("Burnt Norton") where, pre-Lapsarian Eden accommodates the two birds from the Upanisads, on high and low branches, one swayed by and the other untouched by the passions.

The tale of sage Vyaghrapada having obtained tiger's paws and eyes as a boon to enable him to gather the freshest buds before dawn, attests that the maintenance of the nandavanam (garden) is an ancient tradition in India. The garden is crucial to the story of Saint Andal. Found in infancy under a tulsi plant in the nandavanam, she was to be caught by her adopted father in the "sacrilegious" act of wearing the garland of flowers he had gathered and strung for the temple deity. But the Lord rejected the fresh garland he made and demanded the one worn by His beloved Andal. Songs describing this occurrence have been chanted through the centuries by the faithful, and treasured as part of the best poetry written in Tamil. With its purity and fragrance, the garden in bhakti literature prefigures the heavens.

An older secular Sangam tradition however, sees the garden with different eyes. Naivette is not a virtue here. Knowledge, even if it destroys innocence, brings excitement, discovery and growth. Poet Kapilar makes the young girl say that she prefers the wild forest to the safe home, and "muddied" passion to the pure, honeyed milk of childhood.

"Sweeter than milk
mixed with honey from our gardens
is the leftover water in his land,
low in the waterholes
covered with leaves
and muddied by animals."