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His use of rhetorical figures takes into account not only the emotional value of the figure itself, but also its effect on the distribution of accents and sounds in the poem, its usefulness as an element of composition, its contribution to style and its familiar value to the reader-that is, its combined emotional and aesthetic effects. It is interesting to observe that in selecting his figures, Sri Chinmoy is drawing from a personal storehouse of expression[16] and not from a formal study of the traditional classifications. Needless to say, the accepted Greek terms of prosody, for example, can legitimately be applied to many of the figures that he employs, though it is doubtful whether these terms are still meaningful to the modern reading public. The question of rhetorical terminology has long been thought to confuse the more essential issue of the poetic function of rhetoric. Thus W.S. Howell in his Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700 writes:
It may seem strange that human energy should be applied so diligently to this interminable enumeration of stylistic devices, when the subject of communication offers more philosophic and more humane approaches. [Such an interest is] more concerned with the husks than with the kernel of style. [17]
While a laborious classification of figures may justify Mr. Howell's criticism, I believe that the identification of such devices as they occur within the texture of the poem is fundamental to an appreciation of the artistry of the poems as a whole. If we recognise that a poet has a preferred rhetorical figure for certain situations, does this not become a "formula" of composition? It follows that, given an analogous situation, the poet will intuitively resort to his formula as the most apt vehicle for expression. This is not to suggest that such formulae are rigidly introduced into the poem, but rather that in the crucible of composition poetic thought and poetic form are somehow inextricably linked. It is a bond which may go far deeper than the level of conscious creation. Two of the areas in which rhetoric operates virtually as a mode of thought or feeling in Sri Chinmoy's poems are those of parallelism and the compound noun, which I propose to examine in depth. As both an inner and an outer structure, parallelism is one of the major formal principles of Sri Chinmoy's poetry, providing him not only with an instrument of balance, unity and coherence but with a supple means of presenting fine gradations of meaning, a patterning of ideas as well as sounds.
