Ravana’s threat is horrifying and deliberately so, yet he is not a simple brute. He explains his own restraint (verses 2 to 5): desire has made him soft toward her, and he resents it. The poet’s portrait of him in verses 24 to 29 holds both sides: “like a wish-fulfilling tree, like Spring in person, yet frightening though adorned, like a shrine on a cremation ground”.

Sita’s reply reveals a hidden power. She says she could burn him with her own spiritual heat but will not, because Rama has not asked it and because using it would spend her austerity (verse 20). The tradition reads this as the key to the whole captivity: Sita is not helpless; she chooses to wait for Rama to act, so that the victory will be his and dharma will be seen to be done.