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What identity exists between poetic symmetry and universal truth that man's intellect intuitively responds to What power is contained within a parallel structure that causes it to lie charged with energy, like a coiled spring. In spite of his use of formulae, what elusive grace of style, peculiar to the oral poet, imparts to his songs an air of spontaneity, a feeling of hearing something for the first time. Reading Sri Chinmoy's poetry, such questions impress themselves upon one's mind again and again. One thing is clear, the age of Rhetoric has not, as De Quincey declared so long ago, "passed among forgotten things."

One of the most distinctive and lively features of Sri Chinmoy's poetry is his use of the hyphenated compound noun. Although not unique to him, having been used with effect by Hopkins, Pound, Emily Dickinson and others, none has used it as extensively or as strenuously. Sri Chinmoy appears to have alighted on this form in response to two differing impulses in his work: the first impulse is reductive, an urge for compression and restraint, a winnowed style; the second, and seemingly opposing impulse, stems from the very nature of his spiritual vision which would seem to command a movement of amplification, whereby the vision is not merely reproduced but expanded, with new things constantly set into relation with it. J.A.Burrow reminds us that

Spiritual discourse differs from its everyday counterpart in being radically metaphorical throughout.[34]

Spiritual writing opens outwards with both an explanative and a kerygmatic purpose and yet, because of the ineffability of its content, it also inclines to speech modes that are brief and enigmatic. The compound noun is the expression and resolution of these apparently conflicting inner forces.

The telescopic effect of a noun + noun combination may be observed in the following poem from Sri Chinmoy's volume From the Source to the Source:

NOW YOU ARE CAUGHT

    Man's darkening thought
Has blighted your Puritv-heart
    Now you are caught
By ruthless destruction-dart.[35]