Kalidasa and Keats to Autumn

Kalidasa, John Keats · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages placing *two poems on the same subject side by side, each under its own heading: Kalidasa's verses on autumn in the translation by A.W. Ryder, professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley, and Keats's To Autumn* complete.

Kalidasa's autumn is a person. She comes as a maiden fair in slenderness and grace, with nodding rice-stems in her hair and lilies in her face, clad in the flowers of grasses, greeted by birds whose cooing is likened to the tinkling of bracelets. The night wears a diadem of multitudinous stars, her silken robe is white moonlight set free from cloudy bars, and her face is the radiant moon — a slender maid who will soon be a woman grown. The season then acts on the world through a second figure: the wind ruffling the lily-ponds where blossoms kiss and part, dancing in the blossom-burdened trees, and stirring fond lover's fancies in the young man's eager heart. Keats's autumn works differently, by accumulation rather than portraiture — a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun, conspiring with him to load the vines round the thatch-eaves, bend the apple trees, fill all fruit with ripeness to the core, swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells, and set budding still more late flowers until the bees think warm days will never cease. Setting the two together lets a reader see one poet make the season a figure and the other make it a weight of ripening things.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.3 MB, 3 pages)