A History of Sanskrit Literature c15.4

c15.4

Kālidāsa's *Meghadūta*, or "Cloud Messenger," is a lyrical gem which won the admiration of Goethe. It consists of 115 stanzas composed in the *Mandākrānta* metre of four lines of seventeen syllables. The theme is a message which an exile sends by a cloud to his wife dwelling far away. The idea is applied by Schiller in his *Maria Stuart*, where the captive Queen of Scots calls on the clouds as they fly southwards to greet the land of her youth (act iii. sc. 1). The exile is a Yaksha or attendant of Kubera, the god of wealth, who for neglect of his duty has been banished to the groves on the slopes of Rāmagiri in Central India. Emaciated and melancholy, he sees, at the approach of the rainy season, a dark cloud moving northwards. The sight fills his heart with yearning, and impels him to address to the cloud a request to convey a message of hope to his wife in the remote Himālaya. In the first half of the poem the Yaksha describes with much power and beauty the various scenes the cloud must traverse on its northward course: