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Previously Sri Chinmoy has presented despair as a mood of quiet, inexpressible pain. However, in this magnificent graphic picture of naked man moving sleeplessly among the scenery of hell in a smoke-filled night, pain is searing and intolerable. The poet externalises a landscape of grief which has all the traditional attributes of hell-night, fire, smoke. Under the overpowering influence of these retrograde forces he becomes as one of the inhabitants of Dante's first circle of hell-wandering sleeplessly through the night in a heavy stupor, unable to act otherwise, unable also to cease from acting, a slave deprived of both will and dignity. For him to be dead were better than this "stamp" of evil.

A commentary on this pitch of despair is provided by St. Ignatius Loyola in his definition of spiritual desolation:

I call desolation ... as darkness and disquiet of soul, an attraction towards low and earthly objects, the disquiet of various agitations and temptations, which move it to diffidence, without hope and without love, when the soul finds itself slothful, tepid, sad, and, as it were, separated from its Creator and Lord.[24]

To understand despair, to pierce its essence, is, from the point of view of the spiritual poet, to see it as the trace of God's lost presence. Pain supplies the gap left by God. It is this recognition that forces Hopkins to cry out:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?[25]