The poet’s song celebrates his oneness with God. It is a response to the call of God’s Voice. In this experience, the consciousness of I-hood is suspended and the poet’s exalted state becomes ours also, by virtue of our identification with his liberated speaking voice.
The degree to which a writer may enlarge his personality in order to attain this very comprehensive humanity is frequently considered to be the mark of a great writer, especially in Indian literature. Rabindranath Tagore explains:
” What then is revealed through literature? It is our wealth, our plenitude, that part of our being which overflows in excess of our actual needs, which has not been exhausted in the process of practical life. In such excess is humanity truly expressed. That man hungers is true, but that he is brave is still more true. The superman, the ideal toward which man is progressing, is being evolved by his literature, and such permanent ideal is being accumulated therein as a guide for each succeeding generation.”
The great writer assimilates into his nature the thoughts and feelings of others and then reflects them in his work. At times, this may even lead to the illusion, as it has in the case of Shakespeare, that there is no unified “personality” of the writer behind his words. Sri Chinmoy, too, enjoys a multitude of different voices and forms but is confined by none of them. His “personality” ever eludes our grasp because it has been totally encompassed by the universal Self.
As readers and as seekers of the highest truth, we are bound to find ourselves mirrored in many of the poems. This is especially so at the lyric extreme of the axis, for the lyric most aptly expresses man’s searching and struggling. Among the many kinds of lyric, none is so poignant as prayer — the solitary human voice reaching out to the Infinite, hoping for a response:
LET ME LIVE ON EARTH A LITTLE MORE
O my Boatman,
Let me live on earth a little more.
Let me succeed in bringing to the fore
My long-lost aspiration-flames
From the teeming clouds of years.
(573)
Prayer introduces a dramatic occasion for the poem and lends itself to a greater immediacy. The speaker is no longer avoiding direct communication and, even though the Boatman who is addressed remains invisible, there is a movement of the poem outwards and away from the self. Sri Chinmoy is particularly fond of extending this lyric form of address to abstract qualities, such as hope or faith, and to the fundamental divisions of man – body, vital, mind, heart and soul. The following two poems are representative of these invocations:
O COME BACK
O come back,
My childhood faith-flowers.
O come back,
My adolescent aspiration-flames.
(2152)
This rhetorical address to the abstract qualities of faith and aspiration appears both graceful and natural in the poem. It uniquely conveys the passionate longing of the speaker for a revival of his spiritual life. A similar rhetorical device in the next poem allows the speaker to enrich and clarify his sense:
TWO BEAUTIFUL GIFTS
O my mind’s
Thoughtless and speechless clouds,
Two beautiful gifts
Have I for you:
A secret imagination-smile And
A sacred aspiration-cry.
(2105)
The poet is able to delineate the poverty of the mind without forsaking the spontaneity of direct speech. It is clear that in these examples the poet is moving away from the purely self-referential terms of the lyric. As the poet withdraws his projection of the “I”, so the necessity of creating any fictional occasion for the poem is also removed. What remains is a greater directness of address to the reader, culminating in the aphoristic extreme at the far end of the axis:
EVERY ASPIRATION-DAY
Every aspiration-day
Begins with new possibilities.
Every aspiration-day
Ends with new achievements.
(391)
Here we do not think of the poet at all. Nothing impedes our perfect communion with the words of the poem. Truth is expressed in its quintessence and we must somehow rise up to it.
In certain poems Sri Chinmoy provokes this imaginative and intuitive collaboration by structuring his poem as a gradually deepening meditation: