वृक्षान्मृगांश्च पृच्छतो रामस्य विलापः

As Rāma hurried homeward, the lower lid of his left eye began to throb, he stumbled, and a trembling came over his body. The poet is precise, naming not just the eye but its lower lid, and a throbbing on a man's left side is a well-known omen of misfortune. The stumble too belongs to haste, and the outward slip mirrors an inward one. Noticing these ill omens again and again, he said aloud, "Can it be well with Sītā?", the question itself showing his wavering mind. Longing to see her, he pressed on to the hermitage, and when he saw the dwelling empty his heart was shaken. Rushing about as though distracted, flinging his arms about, the delight of the Raghus looked all round the site of the hut, here and there, and saw the leaf-hut without Sītā, robbed of its beauty and wrecked, like a lotus pond struck by winter frost. The image is deeply affecting: frost withers a lotus pond's flowers without uprooting it, and just so the hut still stood but its beauty was gone. In that single picture the poet sets down the feeling of the whole sarga.

The hermitage seemed to weep through its trees. Its flowers had withered, its deer and birds drooped, its splendour was gone, everything was in ruins, and even the forest deities had forsaken it; where not even the gods remain, a place is empty indeed. Seeing the deserted hut, with deerskins and kuśa grass scattered and the seat and mat flung about, Rāma lamented again and again. Those scattered things are the marks of a struggle, not mere disorder; the reader pictures Rāvaṇa's violence, but Rāma does not yet know it. His lament began as a list of possibilities: "She has been carried off, or she is dead, or lost, or devoured. Or perhaps the timid one has hidden herself, or gone into the wood. Or she has gone to gather flowers or fruit, or to the lotus pond, or down to the river for water." This is grief's first stage, when the mind will not accept the truth and searches for comforting alternatives, and the possibilities move from the dreadful to the harmless, as though the heart were trying to console itself.

For all his searching he could not find his beloved in the forest. His eyes red with grief, the glorious Rāma looked like a madman; the poet says this three times in the sarga, marking how his state grows worse. Running from tree to tree, to the hills, the rivers and the streams, he wandered lamenting, drowning in grief that was at once a mire, where every step sticks, and an ocean, where one sinks. Then begins the sarga's famous address to the trees. "Kadamba, have you perhaps seen my beloved, who loved the kadamba flower? If you know, tell me of Sītā with her lovely face. Bilva, if you have seen her, fair as a glossy young leaf and dressed in yellow silk, her breasts shaped like your fruit, tell me." The kadamba and the bilva come first because their flower and fruit are likened to her body, and so with each question some part of his beloved is recalled; that is how a separated lover's mind naturally works. With every tree its own flowers or fruit supply the comparison with Sītā, a lovely device of the poet's.

"Arjuna tree, tell me of my beloved who loved the arjuna: is Janaka's slender daughter alive or not? This kakubha surely knows Maithilī, whose thighs are like its trunk, for it stands here rich in creepers, young leaves and blossoms. And you, best of trees, with bees humming round you, this tilaka surely knows her who loved the tilaka. Aśoka, you who drive away sorrow, my mind is struck down by sorrow; let me see my beloved and make me at once one who bears your name, sorrowless." This is the sweetest plea in the sarga, for in it he asks for the very meaning of the tree's name. "Palmyra, if you have seen her whose breasts are like your ripe fruit, and if you have any pity for me, tell me of that lovely woman." Asking pity even of things without feeling, Rāma seems utterly forlorn. "Rose-apple, if you have seen her whose sheen is like the gold of the Jambū river, if you know my beloved, tell me without holding back." The poet strings these verses into one long garland, each with a tree's name, its special beauty and then the question. None of them answered; there was only silence everywhere, and that silence doubled Rāma's loneliness.

"Ah, karṇikāra, today you are in flower and shine so beautifully; if you have seen my good wife, who loved the karṇikāra, tell me." Then the glorious Rāma went to the mango, the nīpa, the great sāla, the jackfruit, the kurava, the dhava and the pomegranate, looked at each, and questioned the bakula, the punnāga, the sandal and the ketaka, wandering through the forest like a madman. By merely naming eleven trees in two verses the poet shows the richness of the Daṇḍaka forest. Next Rāma turned from the rooted things to the creatures that move. "Deer, do you perhaps know Maithilī with her fawn's eyes? My love, with her deer-like glance, may be among the does." "Elephant, if you have seen her whose thighs are like an elephant's trunk, I think you must know of her; tell me, noblest of tuskers." "Tiger, if you have seen my beloved Maithilī, whose face is like the moon, tell me without fear; you have nothing to fear from me." Each creature is tied to a part of her that it resembles, the deer's eyes, the elephant's trunk like her thighs, the moon like her face. That he should promise safety to a tiger in order to question it marks the depth of his state: the very cause of fear had now become the one given reassurance. So both the rooted and the moving world stood witness to his loss.

Then his delusion deepened: he believed Sītā was right in front of him, hiding among the trees. "Why are you running away, my love? Lotus-eyed one, I have surely seen you. Why do you hide behind the trees and not answer me? Stay, stay, lovely one! Have you no pity for me? You were never one for teasing; why then do you slight me? Your yellow silk gives you away, my fair one; I saw you even as you ran. Stop, if you have any love left for me." The madness was brief. Coming back to himself he said, "No, it is not she. My sweetly smiling one has surely been killed; otherwise she would never slight me in such distress." In these verses the poet sets out the whole cycle of his frenzy: the illusion, the speaking to her, the lover's pique, and the return to his senses, his voice softening all the while, from "Why do you run?" to "Stay, stay," to "Why do you slight me?" to "if you have any love." And his reasoning is heartbreaking: she could not ignore him, so she must be gone; the impossibility of her ignoring him became his proof that she was dead.

"The girl has plainly been devoured by the flesh-eating rākṣasas, parted from me, her limbs divided up among them." Convinced of it, he lamented her limb by limb, moving from her face down to her neck and arms as though seeing her form in memory. "That face of hers, with its lovely teeth and lips, its fine nose and lovely earrings, bright as the full moon, has surely been seized and lost its light. That soft, fair neck of hers, the colour of campaka flowers and made for a necklace, was devoured while she was still crying out"; with those words he imagined her eaten alive, and the cruelty of his imagining is complete. "Her two arms, soft as young shoots, flailing and trembling at the tips, were surely eaten along with their bracelets and armlets. Parted from me, though she had kinsfolk in plenty, she was left for the rākṣasas to feed on, like a traveller abandoned by the caravan." His words "surely" and "plainly" keep returning, until his imaginings seem as firm to him as sight. Then, for the first time in this lament, he called on his brother: "Alas, mighty-armed Lakṣmaṇa, do you see my beloved anywhere? Alas, my love! Alas, good lady! Alas, Sītā, where have you gone?" Crying out like this again and again, he ran from wood to wood, now whirling about in haste, now reeling under the force of his grief, now looking like a man possessed. Bent wholly on finding his beloved, he roamed at speed through woods and rivers, mountains, mountain streams and thickets, never resting. At last, entering that vast and mighty forest and ranging over the whole of it in search of Maithilī, he still did not give up hope, and once more made a supreme effort to find her. The sarga ends in a calmer measure, not with frenzy but with steady toil, and that unbroken hope is the seed of all that follows; it is this hope that will carry him onward, as far as the building of the bridge.