A MAP OF SILENCE
What do I see in my
Heaven-free mind?
I see a map
Of midnight-silence
With a stupendous
Satisfaction-smile.
(801)
The life of a lyric poem is often an image or metaphor – in this case the “map of midnight silence” -which, like a doorway held ajar, hints at an infinite extension of meaning.
Sri Chinmoy’s affinity with the lyric immediacy of presentation has led him to establish the short poem as his major literary vehicle. He rarely departs from this consecrated form. The succinctness of the poems increases their air of decorum and restraint while intuitively avoiding the excesses of a Romantic outpouring of sentiment Sri Chinmoy’s lyric voice is pure, lucid and intense, the lyric emotion itself is cleansed and free:
WHERE, O WHERE, IS GOD?
Where, O where, is God?
Is He inside my fondness-hope?
Where, O where, is God?
Is He inside my oneness-scope?
(205)
There is no specific locating source for the poet’s questions. He allows them to get unobstructed hold of the reader, to echo and re-echo within the reader’s consciousness.
And yet one can easily see how such fundamental questioning might give birth to the epic, for it shows the first stirrings of man’s awareness of the Divine. It is the starting point of conscious spiritual evolution, the great quest of man for truth and knowledge. To transform this lyric mode into an epic, the poet could extend the level of fictional projection and create a vast and colourful tableau of characters as a backdrop to the strivings of the epic hero. This is the nature of the Odyssey. It is a carefully detailed history of one representative human being whose large heroic actions reflect the constant alternation of divine potential and human limitation. To an extent, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata of India also fall into this category for though they are written as accounts of the lives of two of India’s major spiritual figures, their many stories have, with the passing of centuries, gained a legendary mythic character. In them the hero becomes a divinised human being.
Neither of these forms of epic corresponds to Sri Chinmoy’s work. There is a direct correspondence, however, in the scale on which these ancient epics operate, in the power of the imagination to exfoliate into multiple forms and create a total, coherent body of vision. The grandeur of conception which sustains the epic is Sri Chinmoy’s also. The impulse of mis vision is to fulfil itself through an extended pattern. It is here that the works of Sri Chinmoy depart from the traditional epic ideal for he has based his epic, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames, on the essentially discontinuous and self-complete unit of the stanza. In former times, the epic has developed out of the shorter episodic modes, such as lyric, aphorism and commandment. In Ten Thousand Flower-Flames, as in the Vedas of India, these shorter autonomous forms are the very instruments through which the poet reveals his epic vision.
The Odyssey and the Iliad are epics of journey; the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are epics of vision, while the Vedas and Ten Thousand Flower-Flames are epics of revelation. In the first the soul searches, in the second the soul sees and in the last the soul becomes. Here, in the epic of revelation, we ourselves are that hero of great proportions and the many hues of the poems relate all that has come and all that is still to pass in the life of the soul. Shelley describes this epic role:
“Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time.”
Sri Chinmoy is at once the seer and the poet, studying the spiritual advances of mankind through the richness of his multi-faceted creation: