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When prayer issues from the depths of despair, we begin to hear all the countless subtle changes of the speaking voice. We particularly hear the poet's begging, pleading, assuring, yearning, lamenting, protesting and promising voice. To pray to God, by definition, is to talk. In lyric prayer the intimacy of this speech is at once poetic subject and the source of poetic technique. The emotional life that lyric prayer records is wide-ranging and rich; its style is modelled on the spoken language, moulded, writes Louis Martz,

to express the unique being of an individual who is seeking to learn, through intense mental discipline, how to live his life in the presence of divinity.[26]

 
Prayers which issue from despair and which become a cry of the soul to God often conform to a dominant rhetorical pattern of strength developing out of weakness. Thus darkness can be transfigured within the body of the poem by the promise of dawn; lovelessness can give way to an assurance of divine love; hunger and thirst to spiritual nourishment. Sri Chinmoy's imaginative response to despair is more fully engaged by this process of transformation than by the depiction of despair as an unqualified state for it allows him to explore his condition in relation to an ideal state. In this way the technique of opposition becomes not only a mode of operation but a way of seeing and consequently a way of transcending experience. An excellent example of this artistic and spiritual resolution is the following invocation:

0 PIERCING RAY

0 piercing ray,
Do pierce this body of clay
0 illumining light,
Do illumine this life of night.[27]

The dramatisation of darkness and light in order to specify God's transforming power belongs to a well-established tradition. What Sri Chinmoy brings to this tradition is renewed simplicity, vigour and intensity in a brilliantly abbreviated construction. The very focus of the poet's image of light as a single arrow-like ray gives it sharp and distinct contours. The ray is to pierce the speaker. Indeed, he implores it to enter his body That, the poet intends us to associate this action with pain is evidenced by the fact that he chooses to employ the adjective "piercing" again in the second line, this time in its form as a transitive verb.