shankar kashyap

         An Idyll is a short poem written describing the idyllic countryside. Originated in Greece by Theocritus, trying to veer away from Homer’s complex ballads and epics and make them accessible to simple rustic folk. The word Idyll comes from the Greek word Eidyllion or little picture. It pictures a rural scene, mostly of peace and tranquillity while the world outside is racing ahead at breakneck speed. The term “Idyllic” also comes from this.

        It was picked up and used by many European poets, including Alfred Tennyson (Idylls of the King) and Nietzsche (Idylls from Messina). Tennyson’s work popularised the story of King Arthur in his epic Idylls of the King. He has used his own surroundings as the basis of his rustic description and still remains one of the best classics of all times.

“And a fainter onward, like wild birds that change
Their season in the night and wail their way
From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream
Shrill’d: but in going mingled with dim cries
Far in the moonlit haze among the hills
As of some lonely city sack’d by night,”

Rural scene evokes different feelings and emotions in different people. But by and large it is the peace and tranquillity that wins most of the time. Twilight in either urban or rural setting evokes a feeling of an end or coming of an end. It could be sad or pleasant. The rural setting does evoke a strong sense of something coming to an end.

       Oscar Wilde’s Humanitad is such an example of evoking intense human emotions in an idyll –

“It is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn’s gaudy livery whose gold”

The rhyming is not rigid and that makes understanding of the emotions of the poem that much more evocative.

Twilight

           Here is my example. The colours displayed by nature at dusk and twilight varies from day to day and place to place. Painters love the twilight as it gives them some freedom to experiment with colours, they are often restricted from using but love to use. Twilight brings out a feeling of peace in some and a sense of melancholy in others.

Queen of colours flooded crimson, the face of the sky
And so, declared it was evening then
The village’s edge the cloak of leaves carelessly fallen
Now and then stirring in the river, so gentle a breeze
A crimson and gold sky above turned dark violet
Stars shone like the blossoming white flowers
Scattered in a woman’s sleek black hair
The full moon like the azalea flower was smiling
Girl with big round eyes whom all desire
Was returning home with a basket of fruit
The path to the orchard like a frolicsome kitten
Was following her tangling her feet behind
Cool breeze, scented with autumn flowers
A pigeon freed from my heart following her shadow
Unaware of what it was doing
Following the sun as it set on horizon
Letting the moon reign over ethereal sky.

Shankar Kashyap