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Like many of Sri Chinmoy's poems, "Bird of Light" celebrates the subjective viewpoint, casting its lot with the directly spoken word rather than with a more formal or literary descriptive mode. The style, therefore, is allied to the natural rhythms of the speaking voice and, more particularly, to the passionate self-interrogation of despair.

The poem begins with a mystifying rhetorical question. The triple repetition, by anaphora, of the word "one" identifies to the reader the urgency of the question, while the poet's slightly archaic expression "ever and anon," with its delicate, lingering effect, surrounds the unseen caller with the mysterious vagueness of centuries--the unfathomable note coming to him from afar, an almost Romantic recall to consciousness.

Postponing for the moment his reply to the caller, the poet reflects upon his own inner condition. Suddenly we are plunged into the forlorn and desperate "death-in-life" of modern man, uncertain of his direction, living in a constant state of self-forgetfulness. The poet's utter helplessness is borne by two lines which parallel each other not only in their structure but in an exact correspondence of key words, a double rhetorical figure identified by the Greeks as compar:

I know not where I am.
I know not whither I shall go.