The drama Shakuntala, Kalidasa's masterpiece, is a development of a story in the Mahabharata. It has won acclaim from the great German poet Goethe. The celestial dancer Menaka had charmed the great sage Vishvamitra and had a daughter through him. She abandoned the child in a wood where Kanva, another sage, took her into his hermitage. She grew up in the hermitage, When King Dushmanta came there hunting, he fell in love with Shakuntala. He married her, promising to make her son the heir to the throne. Even though Dushmanta went with promises to return, the sage Durvasa's curse made him forget them all. When Shakuntala went up to the royal court to press her claims, Dushmanta denied all knowledge of her. Only later, when he saw his son growing up in another hermitage he accept him, and his mother Shakuntala, and take them to the palace with him. The poem Meghadutam (Cloud-Messenger) is a lyric in a little over100 verses, divided into two parts Purvamegha (Previous Cloud) and Uttaramegha (Subsequent Cloud). Kubera, the treasurer of the gods, has a species of creatures called yakshas working for him. One of them was so besotted with his wife that he neglected his duties. Kubera cursed him by banishing him to the earth. There too he thought of his wife all the time, and when he saw a rain-cloud pass overhead, requested it to carry his message to his wife at the Alakapuri he had been banished from. The poem describes the route the cloud was to take, and the descriptions are consciously decorative so as to make the route seem attractive to the cloud. It treats both Nature and human emotions with exquisite craftsmanship.

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