Tuesday 22 October 2013

Vedic Poetry

The visions of the beauty of life and nature in the Veda's or during the Vedic period are extremely rich in poetic value. Perhaps nowhere else in the world has the glory of dawn and sunrise and the silence and sweetness of nature recieved such rich and at the same time such pure expression. The beauty of woman has been most tenderly delineated. It has been said by Anatole France that the smile on the woman's face marked a new step in human evolution. The Veda's speak of "Gracious smiling women" and in Ushas (Sunrise), with the beauty of the youthful woman, they find the perfect smile. They regard the love if man and wief and the mother-hood of woman with a profound sense of sanctity. Life's little things are invested with holiness and living appears to be a grand ritual. If great poetry is the combination of what have been called "The emphasis of sense," if it unties imagery and melody into a complete whole, then there is no truer or greater poetry than we find in the finest of the Vedic verses. 

In english literature only the noblest passages in Shakespeare and Milton, for example, can be cited as a parallel to the best of the Vedic hymns, in respect of the spontaneity of expression, the power and sweep of rhythm and subtlety and solemnity of effect. If sublimity is the echo of a great soul, certainly Vedic poet and a greater soul than is found lodging in primitive man. 

A.C Bose, Bhavan's Journal

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