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CANTO XII
1. Meanwhile came the morning, with the swans darkened by the swirling pollen of the partly open blue lotus blossoms, and the night lotus pools turning green as the flowers partly closed their petals.1
2. The last watch of the night, suffused with crimson by the rising sun, and knocked at the base by the moonlight, grey like a flood, vanished like a stretch of river bank, tinged with the colour of red earth.2
3. On the surface of the earth, with the moonlight eclipsed by the gleams of the morning sun, only the outline of the receding grey shadows of the trees could be seen as they moved. 3 .
4. The night lotus bed closed its petals, and the orb of the moon that had half gone down was bereft of lustre. The splendour of the night faded away, and the feeble stars of the eastern sky were overpowered by the rising sun.
5. Free from darkness, the sky, with patches of clouds, permeated by the rays of the rising sun, red as the young foliage of trees, resembled a part of a jewel mountain, bristling with slabs of realgar crumbling to dust.
6. Meanwhile the moon, greyish like an elephant's footprint, filled with rain-water, reached the slope of the western mountain, as if it had slid down the sky when it slanted on being raised by the morning sun.
7. The wind-swept woods were resonant with the clear and sweet notes of the birds, with the bees humming, and the foliage lighter, being rid of frost.
8. Overpowered and displaced by the morning sun, the lunar orb, heavy with the dense moonbeams nestling on its bosom, drop
1. The day lotus opens and the night lotus closes in the morning.
2. The fading twilight with the first gleams of the morning sun is likened to a river bank with layers of red earth, eroded by a flood to which the pale moonlight is compared.
3. Cf. Madhava in Extracts.
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