Kālidāsa describes the seasons and the landscape of the seasons, but the seasons have not become symbolic in him of the varied stages of love and the different emotional experiences of lovers.9 He is intent only on union and separation. Yet some of the details of his landscapes are similar to those of the Tamil poets for this reason that climatic conditions in Central India are similar in certain respects to those obtaining in Tamil Naad. But the resurrection of Nature and the newness of life that Kālidāsa describes in his canto on Spring are not applicable to the Southern country. Here are lines from his first canto on Summer, and these may be compared with the Tamil poems on the paalai region: Travellers, whose hearts are scorched by the fire of separation from their sweethearts, cannot even look at the earth wherein columns of dust are raised by unbearable gusts (of wind) (and) which is heated by the blaze of the fierce sun. | Exceedingly scorched by the fierce sunshine, their palates dried up by great thirst, the beasts have started off to another forest. | Greatly scorched by the rays of the sun, a herd of wild boars are as it were entering the earth, digging by means of rows of long-stretching snouts a pond wherein the mud has dried up and (only) the bhadra musta grass remains. | All birds are panting, sitting on trees whose leaves have fallen off; troops of fatigued monkeys are resorting to mountain-caverns. | Everywhere the ground has been burnt by the wild fire . . . The conflagration starting on the skirts torments all beasts; increasing with the wind it burns in the mountain valleys; it breaks forth with sharp noises in places abounding with dry bamboos, growing strong in a moment it spreads in the grass.
| Elephants, oxen and lions, their bodies scorched together by fire have flocked together like friends . . . they rest by a river with broad sandy banks.
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The following lines on the season of "Rains" are reminiscent of the Cankam poets: Women are going, the ground on their way being shown by flashes of lightning. |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9 SRI AUROBINDO, Kalidasa, Calcutta, 1929, p. 36: "He fell back on the life of sensuous passion with images of which, no doubt, his ungoverned youth was most familiar." |