दशरथकौसल्ययोः परस्परप्रसादनम्

At the end of the previous sarga the king had fainted on hearing Kausalyā's terrible words, and here that moment is drawn out. Made to hear such harsh words from Rāma's mother in her anger and grief, the unhappy king fell to brooding. As he brooded, his senses were thrown into confusion by a swoon, and only after a long while did that scorcher of his foes come to himself. As soon as he recovered his senses, sighing long and hot, he saw Kausalyā at his side and sank into thought again. The poet shows a circle: brooding, swoon, recovery, brooding again, from grief to faint, from faint back to consciousness, and again to grief. "Made to hear" shows the king's passivity: he did not answer, he only listened. The epithet "scorcher of his foes" is pointed: he who used to scorch his enemies was now scorched by his own grief. Kausalyā's anger, though, would not last; in the verses to come it turns into a plea for forgiveness. So the sarga opens joined to the last words of the one before.

As he brooded, there came back to him an evil deed he had done long ago in ignorance, when he could shoot at a target by its sound alone. Here a new thread of the story is opened for the first time; it will be unfolded in the sixty-third sarga. Sick at heart from that old grief and from his grief for Rāma, the great king was scorched by both at once. "In ignorance" matters: the deed was done unintentionally, yet its fruit did not let him go, and here the law of action is hinted at. The two griefs belonged to different times, one old, one new, and both burned the king in the same moment. Burning with both, the stricken king, trembling, with folded hands and face bent low, spoke to Kausalyā to win her forgiveness. That a king should fold his hands before his wife shows the measure of his remorse.

The king pleaded in three verses. Kausalyā, I beg your pardon; see, I have folded my hands to you. You are always tender and never cruel, even to strangers, so how much more to me. Then he stated a general principle of dharma: for women who weigh what dharma is, a husband, whether he has virtues or none, is a god they can see. Finally he applied the rule to her: You have always been devoted to dharma and have seen the best and worst of the world; grieved as you are, you should not speak unkindly to one who grieves even more. By "one who grieves even more" he meant himself. His words have three parts, a plea, a general principle of dharma and its application, the method of formal argument, but softened here by love.

Hearing the king's pitiful words in his distress, Kausalyā shed tears as a gutter pours fresh rainwater, an image from the rainy season for a ceaseless stream. Weeping, she took the king's folded hands, lovely as a lotus, and placed them on her head, and in her alarm and agitation she spoke, her words tumbling over one another. Be gracious, she said; I beg you with bowed head; I have fallen at your feet. That you should plead with me, my lord, is my undoing; I am the one to be forgiven by you, not to be struck down like this. Note the change of mood: she who reproached him in the previous sarga now fell at his feet, which makes it plain that her anger had been born of grief.

She admitted her fault: a woman who has to be coaxed into good temper by her wise husband is not praised in either world. I know dharma, you who know dharma, and I know you speak the truth; whatever I said, I said in the pain of grief for my son. Then she described the nature of grief: grief destroys steadiness, grief destroys learning, grief destroys everything; there is no enemy like grief. A blow that falls from an enemy's hand can be borne, but grief, once it falls, cannot be borne, however slight. These two verses are famous as wise sayings. The first repeats three times that grief destroys, and the second compares grief with a weapon's blow: the outward blow can be borne, the inward one cannot.

Then she told how long the time had seemed: Five nights are counted here since Rāma went to the forest, and to me, whose joy grief has killed, they seem like five years. As I think of him, this grief swells in my heart as the great waters of the sea swell with the rush of the rivers. While Kausalyā was still speaking these good words, the sun's rays grew faint and night came on; the fading sun mirrors the king's own dimmed splendour. Then the king, comforted by Queen Kausalyā's words and yet overwhelmed by grief, fell asleep. Two opposite states, comforted and overwhelmed, are set in a single verse. The sarga ends on a quieter note, but "overwhelmed by grief" prepares for his waking in the next sarga, for this sleep was not peace but only a brief pause in his sorrow.