T Wignesan Poet Villanelle

Villanelle: Whose Terse Lines Lie Entangled In the Colophon

Villanelle: Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
  
 for the author - male or female, prince or pauper, playboy or priest - of the
   THIRUKKURAL*, the reputed "bible" of the Tamils, the principal Dravidian race  credited with having engendered the first literary heritage of the Indian sub-continent. Only one thing might be said of him with certitude:
he tamed the language like none other and was more alive to his "times" and his literary, inter-personal, romantic, religio-philosophical  and political  environment than any prince, philosopher or priest ever since. In my view, whoever he may have been, he was an unjustifiably oppressed individual like King Wen who wrote the judgments on the hexagrams and provided the explanations of their images and the Later Heaven arrangement of the Yi Jing, the Canon of Change.

Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
  Words come asunder blown on road side-table
Debris of wanton collisions intone

Long-gone ages singe the stylo his work shone
   Who knows what diamond crumbs spill disable
Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon

Sans case-endings morphemes participial pun
   Regimented feet in seven steps enable
Debris of wanton collisions intone

Who confined meaning in drumbeat phoneme moan
   Lest envy upper-caste knowledge expose enable
Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon

None know who he was nor what age saw he sun
   Savants pat cheeks his lines to render readable
Debris of wanton collisions intone

While lordly conferees seek to feather nests own
   His sculpted riddles tease meaning and jumble
Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
Debris of wanton collisions intone

* Thiru=Sacred; KURAL, meaning "short" or epigrammatic composition in the form of couplets (1330: ten kurals allotted to each topic in three books with a short introduction), composed and ordered according to the rules of a strict classical prosodical pattern: the "venba" metre while adhering to complex rhetorical features, such as, alliteration, assonance, initial-rhymes and ellipses. The author was known as Thiru-VALLUVAR. One of the earliest commentaries on the Kural, still extant, was made by a Tamil scholar PARIMELALAKAR during the 13th century. 
(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 2017 

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