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Yeats achieves this last quality, the metamorphosis of the swans into emblems of immortality, through a series of impressionistic suggestions. The swans are continually half-seen, or else see in terms of some other object. In the sky, for example, they appear "wheeling in great broken rings," a masterful synthesis of visual and musical imagery. On the lake they "drift," two by two, in a frozen tableau. Our view of them is unfocused, an effect which surrounds them with a mysterious beauty. Compare Basho:

Umi kurete/kamo no koe/honokani shiroshi.

 The sea grows dark;
The voices of wild duck
Are palely white.[7]

The brilliant fusion of colour and sound in the image of the wild ducks' cries gives this poem immense inner scope. In the compass of a single metaphor he has captured the shrill and high cries pulsating faintly across the dark sea to the poet. Nothing more is necessary to a forlorn sense of something struggling against the vast forces around it-the "palely white" cries of the ducks disperse helplessly in the darkness. It is receive with profound signification.

This method of expressing the delicate, indefinable inner sense of life by suggestion informs many of Sri Chinmoy's lyrics. Among the lyrics of despair, one example of the pathetic charm that springs from man's questioning of the unalterable laws of nature is the following:

The clouds are sailing towards an unknown world
Adorned with myriad beauty.
A smiling face accompanies them.
The clouds are sailing towards an unknown clime.
0 sky, do tell me where the clouds are sailing.
I ask you with my tearful eyes.
0 sky, will you make my life as bright
and beautiful as the clouds?
0 sky, tell me where the clouds are sailing.[8]

Here the beauty of the unattainable has captured the poet's life. It is the child's perspective of ultimate simplicity that he adopts as he pleads with the sky and looks longingly after the clouds?a child abandoned by its playmates. His is the world of wonder and fantasy, where a radiant face is hidden in the clouds and where the clouds themselves are like his toy boats, sailing out of sight on infinite stretch of blue. The speaker's eyes are wet with tears; at once the tears of a child frustrated by his attempts to recall the clouds and make them answer him and the soulful tears of the imaginative artist, who sees in the clouds a haunting, ungraspable splendour. The despair of this poem is the despair of innocence and innocent longings. Social relationships and personal circumstances cannot rupture the magic now of clouds passing over our heads.