SECTION NINE: EPIC OF THE SOUL
It is almost beyond words to describe the experience of reading these poems as they rushed from the poet’s pen over the three and a half year period of their composition. First a handful of poems appeared, then hundreds and thousands, until finally a great ocean of spiritual wisdom lay before us. As we followed the soul in all its journeyings it seemed that gradually all the world was being translated into words. They entered into us, reverberating in the stillness of our being and setting us afire with aspiration. What need did we have of other writers? In this one man we had uncovered the universe, we had discovered the modern epic of the soul.
In our times the word epic is often used in a loose sense simply to describe a longer poem, its opposite being the lyric or shorter poem. A true epic, however, is characterised not by its length but by the expansiveness of its vision. The epic imagination overflows the bounds of the lyric and seeks to fulfil itself in the larger rhythms of a work or book.
From the succession of moments in a man’s life the lyric poet isolates an instant. His concern is to focus his undiluted attention on a particular emotion and he must realise it in words before it subsides back into the flow of moments. Even though the poet may leave aside details of history or circumstance, the distinctness of his vision is emphasised by the projection of a lyric “I” or fictional speaking voice. By convention, the lyric “I” does not address the reader directly. However, it may be so spacious and universal a voice that it reflects the universal soul. The lyrics of Sri Chinmoy express this width of sympathy. In them we see the individual human spirit mingling with the pervasive universal spirit:
I MUST NOT DELAY!
I must not delay!
My Lord Supreme Himself
Is eagerly waiting for me.
I must not fear!
My Lord Supreme Himself
Is running speedily
To my immediate rescue.
I shall quench His earth-bound Thirst
And He will feed my Heaven-free hunger.
(4447)
The poet has enlarged his personality to encompass a state of being in which the seeker eagerly anticipates his union with God.
The natural unit of lyric expression is the stanza. Within this brief form the writer may exhaust all the potentialities of the single moment. The lyric impression is transient and though it creates its own complete and autonomous world, there is ever the feeling that other states of being hover just beyond the confines of the poem. We cannot read a poem of desolation, for example, without immediately calling to mind its opposite:
I AM WAITING
What am I waiting for?
I am waiting for
A soulful smile from my heart
To save my hopeless
And goalless life.
(2243)
The seeds of the state that is to come are sown into the poem. Already we begin to envisage the changes that “a soulful smile from my heart” will bring and, at the close of the poem, we have already moved forward beyond the present moment.
The epic poet, by contrast, absorbs this multitude of separate moments into a vast and sweeping vision. He is concerned more to articulate the secret well-springs of human nature than the perspective of the isolated individual. The epic poet is seized by the inspiration to go beyond himself in order to reveal the great currents of knowledge and thought that are latent in society at large. Where the lyric poet is the key actor in his own private drama, the epic poet is the invisible spokesman of the greater public life. Lyrics are composed for the moment whereas epics are written for eras.
In the light of this distinction, Sri Chinmoy’s poetry is especially interesting for it seems not to belong wholly to either mode but to partake of the qualities of both and at the same time to rise above them. Clearly, the poet has a lyric disposition. Many of his poems are bound up with a musical or song-like urge which finds its most natural voice in an artless simplicity of language and an elusive, meditative rhythm: