सीताविलापः

While those ungentle rākṣasīs went on and on with their harsh and cruel words, Janaka's daughter wept; they were pitiless creatures and their words were merciless. Spoken to in this way, the high-minded Vaidehī, though utterly terrified, gave them a plain answer in a voice choked with tears: "A human woman cannot become the wife of a rākṣasa. Eat me, all of you together, if you like; I will not do what you say." Fear and courage show together here: her voice faltered, but her resolve did not move, and the epithet "high-minded" points to exactly that steadiness. These words are the keynote of the whole sarga: she accepts death, but not the abandonment of dharma. In the previous sarga the rākṣasīs had threatened to eat her, and her "eat me if you like" throws their own threat back at them. Her answer was brief, and in its brevity the firmness of her character stands out; she also reminded them once more of the difference between a human being and a rākṣasa.

Sitting among the rākṣasīs, Sītā, who was like a daughter of the gods, found no peace; stricken with grief, she felt as if Rāvaṇa were still standing there threatening her. She trembled all the more and shrank into herself as though she would sink into her own body, like a doe separated from her herd and harried by wolves. Holding on to a great flowering branch of the aśoka tree, broken in spirit, she thought of her husband. Her tears ran down in streams and bathed her full breasts, and she could find no end to her sorrow. Trembling, she fell to the ground like a plantain tree in a gale, her face drained of colour in her terror of the rākṣasīs, and as she shook, her long, thick braid was seen to shake with her like a she-serpent gliding along. With three images, the doe, the plantain and the serpent, the poet shows three sides of a single state of terror: fear, collapse and trembling. The flowering branch forms a backdrop in stark contrast to her grief, and her sorrow becomes visible in her very body. Tears bathing her breasts picture their unbroken flow, and it was the memory of Rāvaṇa's threats that set her shaking again and again. Calling her "like a daughter of the gods" recalls her beauty and her divine nature, which makes the misery of her present state stand out all the more sharply.

Sighing, stricken with grief, her mind clouded with anger, the distressed Maithilī shed tears and lamented. "Ah Rāma! Ah Lakṣmaṇa! Ah Kausalyā, my mother-in-law! Ah Sumitrā!" she cried out again and again. "True indeed is the saying the wise repeat, that for woman or man death is hard to come by before its time. For here I am, tormented by these cruel rākṣasīs and cut off from Rāma, and still I live on, even for a moment. With so little merit, wretched as I am, I shall perish like one who has no protector, like a laden ship in mid-ocean battered by the force of the winds." Here Sītā accepted the law of time: death does not come even to one who longs for it. Calling out the names of her mothers-in-law shows her love for her husband's family; Ayodhyā still lived in her mind. The laden ship conveys the weight of her burden and the abundance of her grief. And she said "like one without a protector": her protector was alive, yet being so far away, she was as good as unprotected. So the first part of her lament is full of thoughts of time and of past deeds, and she feels her own life as a burden.

"Not seeing my husband, fallen into the power of the rākṣasīs, I am sinking with grief like a riverbank worn away by the water. Blessed are those who can see my lord, with his eyes like lotus petals, who walks with a lion's stride, grateful and kind of speech. Cut off completely from Rāma, who knows himself, I find life as hard to keep as one would after tasting a deadly poison." Here Rāma's virtues are briefly recalled: his beauty, his valour, his gratitude and his gentle speech. The bank worn away by the water suggests a slow wasting away, and the thought beneath it is that the sight of Rāma was the very ground of her life. There is no envy in "blessed are those who see him", only the pain of one deprived. The image of poison shows that separation from Rāma was deadly: as no one lives after drinking poison, so she could not live without him. "Who knows himself" speaks of Rāma's self-knowledge.

"What great sin can I have committed in some former body, that I must now suffer this terrible, cruel and great sorrow? Overwhelmed by grief, I want to give up my life, for guarded by the rākṣasīs as I am, I cannot reach Rāma. A curse on human birth, and a curse on being in another's power, where one cannot even give up one's life at one's own will!" With this Sītā's lament ends. She looked for the cause of her suffering in her past deeds, since in the Indian view sorrow is the fruit of what one has done before. That even death was not in her own hands, dependent as she was, is the very limit of misery. So the sarga ends with a longing for death, which will grow stronger in the sargas that follow. There is irony in her being "guarded" by the rākṣasīs: that guarding was nothing but captivity. The curse spoken twice shows how deep her despair was, and her grief reveals not only her own plight but a general truth about the dependence of human life.