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A study of the specific modes of iteration according to traditional classifications would reveal that several different kinds of figures are operating in these lines, varying from the correspondence in length of certain clauses, to an exact word-to-word correspondence, and even to the repetition of the same word with no intervening conjunction, as in "mine, mine alone." The linking of words through repetition is not the only resource open to the poet. It may be seen than the use of the words "break" and "build" in close proximity is a subtle rhetorical device of wordplay or paranomasia. Similar in sound but opposite in meaning, these words are interlocked in the taut structure of the verse.
The effect of the many rhetorical devices, even in these few lines, is cumulative. We seem to reach a climax of despair and the closing lament of this first stanza with its heavy rhythmic fall on the final compound noun "destruction-night," dramatically enacts the ebbing of the speaker's life force.
At this point in the poem, the poet's eye moves outwards, beyond his immediate condition to the one who has called him. Without preamble he addresses the caller directly as a "Bird of Light." The status of this bird is maintained at a consciously ambiguous level. Although we may take it as a metaphor for the soul, the insistent and unvarying repetition of the phrase appears to erase the borderline between the metaphor and the object that it qualifies, so that the bird acquires a reality, albeit supernatural, of its own. It may be that a more strictly accurate term for this device is the "kenning" of Old Germanic prosody, an implied simile in circumlocution for a noun not named-sometimes petrified expressions, but in the case of the best writers, port-manteau devices with tremendous suggestive associations.[12] Kenningar are appropriate to the language of a spiritual poet, such as Sri Chinmoy, who selects definite analogies for the relationship between man and God. They not only aid the poet in compressing several ideas together, but they function as readily recognisable signs or counters for the reader. The interpretation of "Bird of Light" as the soul is made possible by a significant transferral of meaning from other poems by the same author. in "Revelation," for example, he writes:
Above the toil of life my soul
Is a Bird of Fire winging the Infinite.[13]
