In many poems this restraint operates so keenly that the poet concentrates his entire meaning into a single token word:
YOU CAN REMAIN UNCHANGEABLE
You can remain
Not only unchanged
But also unchangeable
In this world of cataclysmic changes
If you can make your life
Into a soulful flower-offering.
(6276)
Here, the word “flower” is the open door through which the poet beckons our understanding. If you have grasped the essence of a flower, he is saying, then you will know what is required of your life: unconditional and total self-offering. The entire weight of the poem’s meaning rests upon the degree to which we enter into this word and become one with it. Similarly, in the poem below, the very nature of God’s Heart is captured in the single word “garden”:
A BORN DREAMER
Because you are a born dreamer,
You have a special place
In God’s Heart-Garden.
(5923)
Since these are perennial symbols they contain no hidden allusions. Nor do they require additional explanation. They are self-evident and complete. What we encounter in the poems of Sri Chinmoy is a delight in the simple and the familiar over and above the unusual. He does not cultivate the particular, the novel or the ostentatious, but rather places before us the eternal fact clothed in the transparent raiment of a universal language.
The scope of the poet’s cosmic landscape of symbols is increased by his use of natural features: the mountains, forests, rivers and oceans. Within it he sets deer, horses, elephants, tigers and lambs, each in their universal or typical from. They become archetypes of underlying spiritual realities:
ONLY ONE CAVE
There is only one cave,
And that cave is my heart.
There is only one cave-dweller,
And that cave-dweller is
The self-transcending man
Inside my heart.
(4887)
The essential loneliness of man’s inner self is captured in the image of the cave and reinforced by the poet’s repetition of this word throughout the poem. Again, although the symbolic core of such images is already largely defined, Sri Chinmoy ‘s use of them is in no way binding. Thus the heart, for example, may be represented equally as a cave or a flower or a grove without any reflection on the truth value of each symbol. The harmony between the inner and the outer nature is inclusive and not exclusive. Each application of a symbol tends to convey a new and enlarged significance to its spiritual counterpart. The poet’s prayer is to make a new song out of ancient truths:
I HAVE ONE REQUEST
My Lord,
I have one request:
May my heart sing the song
Of universal oneness.
My Lord,
I have one more request:
May my life sing the song
Of transcendental newness.
(5001)
It is an index of the scope of the poet’s vision that it never loses touch with diurnal existence, it never lodges in a purely ethereal realm and remains forgetful of the common life. But through a greater and greater capaciousness, the poet assimilates all the forms of life into his spiritual vision.