ire and mother blest
Clasp living son to joyful breast.

Flee, son of Shiva, flee the host
Of Indra drowning in the sea
That soon shall close upon his boast
In choking waves of misery.
For Indra is a ship of stone;
Withdraw, and let him sink alone.

Kumara answers with modest firmness.

The words you utter in your pride,
O demon-prince, are only fit;
Yet I am minded to abide
The fight, and see the end of it.
The tight-strung bow and brandished sword
Decide, and not the spoken word.

And with this the duel begins. When Taraka finds his arrows parried by
Kumara, he employs the magic weapon of the god of wind. When this too
is parried, he uses the magic weapon of the god of fire, which Kumara
neutralises with the weapon of the god of water. As they fight on,
Kumara finds an opening, and slays Taraka with his lance, to the
unbounded delight of the universe.

Here the poem ends, in the form in which it has come down to us. It
has been sometimes thought that we have less than Kalidasa wrote,
partly because of a vague tradition that there were once twenty-three
cantos, partly because the customary prayer is lacking at the end.
These arguments are not very cogent. Though the concluding prayer is
not given in form, yet the stanzas which describe the joy of the
universe fairly fill its place. And one does not see with what matter
further cantos would be concerned. The action promised in the earlier
part is completed in the seventeenth canto.

It has been somewhat more formidably argued that the concluding cantos
are spurious, that Kalidasa wrote only the first seven or perhaps the
first eight cantos. Yet, after all, what do these arguments amount to?
Hardly more than this, that the first eight cantos are better poetry
than the last nine. As if a poet were always at his best, even when
writing on a kind of subject not calculated to call out his best.
Fighting is not Kalidasa's _forte_; love is. Even so, there is great
vigour in the journey of Taraka, the battle, and the duel. It may not
be the highest kind of poetry, but it is wonderfully vigorous poetry
of its kind. And if we reject the last nine cantos, we fall into a
very much greater difficulty. The poem would be glaringly incomplete,
its early promise obviously disregarded. We should have a _Birth of
the War-god_ in which the poet stopped before the war-god was born.

There seems then no good reason to doubt that we have the epic