A section from the journey

The Cloud Messenger

Kalidasa also wrote a short lyric poem called the Meghaduta, the Cloud Messenger. A spirit, far from home and aching for his wife, begs a rain-cloud to carry his words to her. Most of the poem is the long road the cloud must travel — over mountains, rivers, and cities. It is one of the most loved poems in Sanskrit.

Kalidasa did not only write plays. He also wrote poems, and one of them is small and perfect, like a single clear note. It is called the . The name means the Cloud Messenger.

Here is its strange and lovely idea. There is a being called a , a kind of nature-spirit. He has done some small wrong, and for it he is sent away from home for a whole year. He lives now far in the south, alone, while his wife waits far away in the north.

The rains come. The sky fills with great dark clouds. And the lonely spirit, watching one cloud drift northward, is seized by longing. He has no messenger, no road home. So he does a thing only a poet would dream. He speaks to the cloud. He asks it to carry his love to his wife.

And then comes the heart of the poem. The spirit tells the cloud the way. Float over this mountain, he says. Rest on that peak. Follow this river. Pass over these fields and that fair city. For verse after verse, he traces the long road north, naming the beautiful things the cloud will see.

So the poem becomes a journey across the whole land in the rainy season. We see rivers swollen and shining, hills washed green, towns and gardens and temple-towers, all through the eyes of a drifting cloud. The longing of one heart opens out into the beauty of a whole world.

This is Kalidasa's special gift. He ties human feeling to the living world so closely that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. The spirit's ache and the heavy rain-cloud are one mood. That is why poets after him, for many centuries, would try to write "messenger poems" of their own. None quite matched the first.

The spirit could not go home, so he sent his love on a cloud. When someone you miss is far away, what carries your feeling to them — a message, a song, a memory? Sit a moment with the thing you would send if you could send only one.