EACH OPPORTUNITY
Intense longing creates opportunity.
Each opportunity
Is more than a blessing.
Indeed,
It is a miniature goal itself.
(147)
The poem opens with a thought-unit or aphorism. Existing as a fully formed and self-complete assertion it has no need of dialectic. It is a proposition about life which holds that the very emotion of longing generates a special force for change. The sudden delivery of this thought, its boldness of generalisation and strict economy of expression make it seem alive. It enters into us, provoking a reaction and urging us to verify its general terms from our own particularised experience. Its posture is candid and unapologetic. There is an engaging willingness on the part of the poet to set his realisation before the reader as lucidly as possible. In consequence, he is not afraid to risk exposure or criticism and he refuses to take refuge in any protective mediation of the bluntness of his expression. Rather, he intensifies and enriches it even further by building a second prepositional thrust onto the foundation of the first. In this second statement the poet examines the nature of opportunity. It is a meditative act or a deepening inwardness and the syntax of the remainder of the poem mirrors this movement by a successive redefinition of the word “opportunity”, first as a blessing and then as a goal unto itself. The poem folds back on itself because the seeds of this goal are contained in the “intense longing” with which the poem began.
The meditative procedure of this poem is not founded upon reasoned argument. It is not an intellectual investigation of the implications of any single word. Rather the poet so totally identifies with the feeling of intense longing that each new expansion of meaning comes to him as an intuitive discovery.
The meditative poem is a progressive clearing of vision. It is not a stumbling or groping movement but a leaping and sparkling play. It is a “showing forth” of meaning. An insight into the action of the heart will invariably be followed by an insight into the action of the mind; conclusions about man are fused with conclusions about God; earth is complemented by Heaven, surrender by gratitude. The examples multiply interminably. In this world of vision no one element can ever be finally isolated. Each separate illumination spontaneously summons a host of others. Everything interrelates to form a single cohesive universe:
HIS ILLUMINATION-MIND
His illumination-mind
Soothes the four corners
Of the world
With the beauty
Of Eternity’s moon.
His perfection-heart
llumines the four corners
Of the world
With the power
Of Immortality’s sun.
(5112)
The poet’s meditation on the mind is amplified by a corresponding meditation on the heart. The original syntactical pattern of the first stanza carries over into the second and has the effect of creating isochronic units that operate, as in music, to prolong the effect of something within the subject reaching out to the four corners of the world.
Through parallelism the poet is able to hold a particular thought or figure before the reader’s attention while he expands its entire frame of reference. In the following poem, for example, the poet presents four parallel meditations on beauty:
BEAUTY
Tenderness lives with beauty.
Kindness lives in beauty.
Soulfulness houses beauty.
Oneness feeds beauty.
(288)