पृष्ठम्:Sanskrit Literature.djvu/१२२

90 KĀLIDĀSA AND THE GUPTAS Ganges and shared by the six Kṛttikās, Pleiades, Kumāra is miraculously born, and grows up delighting his parents by his childish play. But the gods are in terror, the city of the gods is dismayed through Taraka; Indra comes to demand help; Çiva grants his prayer and assigns Kumära to the task. The great host of Taraka is described in Canto xiv, then the portents which warn him not to war (xv). Blinded by pride he refuses, bids his young opponent go back to his father and mother rather than fight, assails him with his whirlwinds and magic fire, until pierced to the heart he falls dead. The poem thus goes far beyond the birth of Kumāra as its title promises, and the inferiority of the new cantos is obvious on every ground. The metre is carelessly handled; in five cases caesura is neglected at the end of the first and third verses of the Çloka, a negligence quite foreign to Kālidāsa; the same carelessness is seen six times in Upajāti stanzas, where too weak caesuras-at the end of a compound, not of a word-are used far more often than by Kalidasa. In order to manage his metres the poet has to resort to versefillers, abhorred of really good writers; su is repeatedly thus used, as well as sadyaḥ and alam; the constant use of periphrasis is doubtless due to the same cause: the writer expends much ingenuity in coining new designations for his characters, and is so fond of the superfluous anta at the end of compounds-which we have seen in Vatsabhaṭṭi-that Jacobi has conjectured that he was a Maratha, in view of the Marathi locative amt. In the later manner is the free use of prepositional compounds and the impersonal passive with subject in the instrumental; the former use just appears in Kälidāsa, the latter is common from Bhäravi onwards. Moreover, save occasionally, as in the battle scene, the poetical value of the cantos is small, and in confirmation of the internal evidence it may be added that neither commentators nor writers on poetics cite them nor are imitations found in later poets. 1 Of Kalidasa's model for his poem we know nothing, but we can trace in it the influence of Vālmīki. In the Rāmāyaṇa ¹ we have a brilliant picture of the contrast of the beauty of spring in the Kişkindhā forest as contrasted with the ceaseless sorrow of Rāma, bereft of Sitã, nor can we doubt that this has influenced 1 iv. 1.