Ganga Stotra — opening verse

The verse is built almost entirely of vocatives. Eight of its words are ways of addressing the river before a single thing is asked, and the only request, when it comes, is modest: not purification, not passage, just that the reciter's attention should settle somewhere. tāriṇī, 'she who carries across', is the word the hymn turns on. It is the ordinary term for ferrying a river and also the standard metaphor for release from rebirth, and Ganga is the one goddess for whom the literal and the figurative sense are the same act. śaṅkaramauli-vihāriṇī recalls the descent: Ganga fell from heaven with force enough to destroy the earth, and Shiva caught her in his matted hair to break the fall. She is still described as living there.