Page 15

In terms of structure, the elements of parallelism in both poems are maintained with rigorous consistency. Each brief colon finds its exact equivalence in the succeeding stanzas. Equivalence of length, equivalence of syntactical order, a perfect rhyming of ideas-all these factors create a style in which correctness of thought is reflected in the exactness of form. It is a blend of wisdom and eloquence, of a lucid apprehension of ideas and a care for proportion of parts. In the same way that the compactness of a maxim fuses with the general truth of its content to command immediate assent, so in these poems the reader intuitively identifies "wise thinking" with the purity and clarity of the style. We emerge with a view of rhetoric as playing a role that is higher and more noble than that of mere persuasion. Perhaps we begin to see it from the classical perspective, as one of the greatest of human excellences, "the means through which man expresses his wisdom, and without which wisdom is inarticulate and inert. [23] In a statement on poetry, Sri Chinmoy affirms this view:

The Sanskrit word for the poet is kavi; a kavi is he who envisions. What does he envision? He envisions the truth, the truth in its seed-form, its potentiality. He envisions the seed-truth in its possibilities and in its inevitabilities. [24]

Walter Pater, in his essay on "Style", upholds this synthesis between poetry and truth:

All beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer
accommodation of speech to that vision within. [25]

The difficulty of pursuing such a belief in practice may be largely due to the diminishing capacity of language itself to carry the reality of what it depicts directly into the listener's consciousness. This is the theory put forward by George Steiner in After Babel:

In certain civilisations there come epochs in which syntax stiffens, in which the available resources of live perception and restatement wither. Words seem to go dead under the weight of sanctified usage; the frequence and sclerotic force of cliches, of unexamined similes, of worn tropes increases. Instead of acting as a living membrane, grammar and vocabulary become a barrier to new feeling. A civilisation is imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches, or matches only at certain ritual, arbitrary points, the changing landscape of fact. [26]