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In many respects kenningar may be considered to be formulae of expression, intrinsic to the metaphoric landscape of any poet.

The poet invites his soaring and blissful soul-bird to take up its abode once more inside his forlorn heart. With plaintive tenderness he recognises the power of the bird to transport him to higher realms and responds:

But how can I?
My heart is in prison,
In the strangled breath of a tiny room.

The wide gulf between the encaged heart and the bird, an emblem of freedom, is a poignant comment on the dissociation between man's soul or psychic capacities and his other faculties. Divorced from his own eternal or visionary self, he is condemned to the narrow confines of what Sri Chinmoy calls his prison and what Hopkins, in "The Caged Skylark," calls his "bone-house, mean house":

As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
    Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house,
        dwells--[14]

Sri Chinmoy concludes his poem on a note of hope. In a final supplication he invokes the bird three times, each successive, identical repetition seeming to gather in intensity yet balanced by the soft, melodious quality of the words themselves. The poet's obvious satisfaction in the sheer repetition of the phrase "Bird of Light" lifts it to the level of song. The words become a garment of lyricism and beauty and he yields before their magic pattern of sounds:

0 Bird of Light, 0 Bird of Light,
0 Bird of Light Supreme,
In me, I pray, keep not an iota of gloom.

The final addition of the word "Supreme" as the song attains its highest point indicates the poet's ultimate recognition of the bird as a direct embodiment or messenger of the Supreme. It is a gracefully appended disclosure, one whose position in the poem is secured by the half rhymes on the phrase "In me" and on the final word "gloom."