A History of Indian Literature v3.c35.s8.66

v3.c35.s8.66

Not from the Prākrit lyrics, but parallel with it, developed the Sanskrit lyrics. But since we know about the famous prized Buddhist songs of Aśvaghoṣa only in heresays, and about those of Mātṛceṭa only in fragments¹ and as only a few stanzas of Bhāsa's songs are found available to us in anthologies, for us, the first great lyric poet of Sanskrit is Kālidāsa. In his epic and dramatic poems Kālidāsa is more or less a lyric writer, and probably the best pieces that he composed in the form of musical poems are contained in many portions of his epics and particularly in his dramas. Kālidāsa is always at the summit of his art in places where he has depicted sentiment and where nature-description and human-feelings are mixed up together in pictures. His most famous lyric poem, however, is the Meghadūta “the Poem of the Cloud-Messenger”², that is counted by Indians among his great epics (mahākāvyas). It can be designated as an "epic inasmuch as the lyric stanzas are clothed in an epic form. The subject-matter is as follows:—