SECTION SEVEN:
THE FORM OF THE POEMS
In order to carry his mantric utterances home to the soul, Sri Chinmoy has explored most of the poetic forms that exist in English literature. Basing his oeuvre on the single, highly compacted stanzaic unit, he spans the full gamut of man’s communicative choices: prayer, question, lyric, hymn, invocation, equation, definition, conversation, aphorism, commandment and riddle. Beneath this multiplicity of forms we find him speaking always with the bare and powerful simplicity that characterises the native voice of intuition.
It is a microcosmic form of poetry. Each unit is structurally complete and independent of its neighbours. Its appearance on the page – so brief that the reader may take it in at a single glance – permits us to grasp the totality of individual poems in a way that is not possible with more extended works.
And yet, in spite of their formal independence, Sri Chinmoy’s poems do reflect upon one another. As we focus on them in succession, we are filled with the conviction that a more structured patterning would have hindered their true purpose – and that is to keep pace with the way in which a man’s perceptions move: one moment he may be overcome by despair, the next he may be inundated with hope; he may dream of realisation, strive for it and even win it but his experiences themselves are constantly shifting, combining, casting new shades of meaning on those that preceded them.
The poems of Ten Thousand Flower-Flames mirror this spontaneous growth towards perfection. The same themes recur again and again in cyclical form so that their angle of presentation varies with the spiritual maturity of the fictional speaking voice. A single theme will help us to follow the trajectory of the poet’s thought through these many different outer forms. Let us take the theme of aspiration and consider some of its enumerations within the series as a whole. I believe it is helpful to see the various forms arranged along an axis where one extreme is the lyric with its pure, subjective utterance of feeling, and the other extreme is the aphorism with its broad, objective generality of statement. The former registers the central feelings of an individual; the latter expresses his seer-vision.
In the lyric poem a single emotion or state of being is dramatised. This emotion exists in the moment, it does not stand in need of supporting details or a locating context. It is itself, alone and without history:
A BROKEN WING
Aspiration-cry I have totally lost.
And now
Each fleeting breath of mine
Is a broken wing
In destruction-night
(1008)
This poignant poem of despair is typical of the lyric in its exclusive attention to the condition of the speaker. It creates an entire world of suffering within its narrow confines. The poet’s image of a wounded bird renders this feeling at its most intense, suggesting a deep inner hurt. The picture of a bird that can no longer fly implicitly calls before us the opposing picture of its naturally soaring flight. By way of negative definition, the poet suggests that this is the true nature of aspiration. The poet clarifies this upward movement of aspiration in another poem:
WHAT EACH KNOWS
My imagination knows
How to run fast.
My aspiration knows
How to fly high.
My realisation knows
How to become soon.
(1033)
As he affirms the essence of imagination, aspiration and realisation the poet also discovers and analyses their differences. While this poem does not exhibit the same emotional curve as the previous poem, it does present a concentrated patterning of experience by the individual speaker. Because it edges towards the kind of understanding which transcends emotion, the speaker is less clearly visible.
We can often recognise the lyrical mode by this presence of an individual speaker. Lyrics, by convention, “ovehear” a speaker in his private self-communion. He does not acknowledge our presence or attempt to explain the fragments that fall to our ears. It is a sealed discourse, originating and ending in the self:
AT LONG LAST
At long last
My unaspiring mind
Has discovered the supreme truth
That my life is full
Of wasted opportunities.
(2237)
Because of the lyric’s isolation, however, it speaks in a pure, lucid voice. It is a voice that is not encumbered by personality. In the poem above, for example, the many wasted opportunities to which the speaker refers are deliberately excluded. This allows the “supreme truth” that he has found to be presented in solitary splendour.
It can be seen that although the lyric exhibits a high degree of privacy, it gains considerable generalising power by appearing out of context. While it does not address the reader directly, and indeed often seems to turn its back to him, the lyric may speak for him, articulating a state with which he can easily identify: