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The natural end of prayer is frequently this kind of pleonastic motion in which the speaker's statement of his request is simultaneous with God's accession. The spontaneous affirmation from God may at times be so swift as to be incomprehensible to the one who has only managed to bring his prayer to a level of articulation with immense difficulty. Herbert acts out this rhythm of prayer and response in the last stanza of "A True Hymne":

"0, could I love!" and stops: God writeth, "Loved . "[32]


If th' heart be moved,
Although the verse be somewhat scant, God doth supplie the want.
As when th' heart sayes (sighing to be approved)

Arnold Stein notes that in many of Herbert's lyric prayers moods of lament and despair are employed by the poet as strategies of love. "They are a kind of ambiguous 'artillery' which attack in order to provoke counterforces," Stein comments.[33] They are, in fact, declarations of love under the guise of complaint and therefore they exploit a fundamental premise of the prayer mode itself


The language of complaint enjoys within its body of laws the advantages of special privilege-whether these are derived from a general license of speaking fictionally, or from the great religious precedents which endow man with certain rights when addressing God: complaint permits the demand that one be heard, and in the first person.[34]


Typical of Sri Chinmoy's poems in which complaint forms part of the love-play between lover and Beloved is the small song "Far, Very Far":


Far, very far,
Near, very near,
I hear Your ankle bells.
Why do I lose my self-form in shyness?
How long have I to wait for You
To tie my hands
With Your love-cord?[35]

 

 

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