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In their search for an exact correlative of the pain at the centre of despair, both poets employ the concepts of Blankness and Nothingness to sabotage time. Gone is the sense of time passing, the continuity that results from the succession of moments. These poems would seem almost to consume themselves rather than move towards a conclusion.
This stalling of time reveals itself as one of the lyricist's major strategies. The fixity of the present, without the boundaries of past and future, beginnings and endings, ushers us into a world of eternal present. When this eternal sense is conferred on a feeling such as despair, unqualified despair, the poet is able to create out of his mood something more than personal lament: under the guise of the first person speaking voice we hear the choral voice of man and experience the unchanging emotions of the human heart.
In other poems by Sri Chinmoy, it is the poet's contemplation of nature that arouses and brings to the fore this sense of the isolated and heightened moment:
Sailing the boat of silver light,
The moon-beauty is fast approaching me.
The sky is vibrating with sweet and melodious songs.
The birds are flying beyond the horizon
To an unknown land.
All my hopes are flying without any destination.
Slowly my life's evening sets in.[3]
Initially, the poet's gaze alights on the moon, whose rapid passage across the sky immediately suggests itself as a silver boat hastening in the direction of the poet. The image is a blend of motion and colour. It reveals to us the exquisite perception of one who is extremely sensitive to beauty The poet's next touch is aural the sound of songs that resonate and vibrate through the air, songs that seem almost to be generated by the sky itself Our growing impression of fulness and energy within these external details is sustained in the final element of the scene. Here we see a flock of birds traversing the sky and attaining the limits of the horizon, from where they continue "to an unknown land." The poet's vision releases them at the point of leaving his picture.
