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Sri Chinmoy's poem stands as a pledge of surrender. Each of the first three
lines affirms this yielding of the spirit. The lines, however, are far from
being cold or strictly obedient for, after each major statement, the poet
has appended a song-like repetition encoding the speaker's wholehearted and
rapturous assent. The echo effect of these musical additions reveals the
pressure of the poet's personality and this in turn gives depth to his note
of surrender. By means of such phrases "...I shall"; ".A shall fly"; "...my
very own" he is able to linger over his pledges, charging them with both
strength and sweetness. Thus, he would seem to be talking simultaneously to
God and to himself: to God he promises to endure the night of darkness; to
himself he promises to uphold his words. The combination of these repetitive
effects, simple lyrical diction and intensity of tone places the reader in
touch with the living sensibility of a man who finds himself in the "darkness"
of faith, poised before the infinite Vast.

The emotional cadence that Sri Chinmoy brings to his lyrics of despair comes
from within: he lives in an inner world of consciousness. If there are forests,
clouds, trees or colours in this world, then they are the translucent shining
forms of imaginative vision. Colour is perceived by an inner sight, music
is played upon the inner ear, movement is felt by a bodiless self.

The spiritual poet sees form as expressive of emotion. As he continually
reaches beyond himself to the God he cannot see or whom he may see only fleetingly,
his moment-to-moment experiences are received almost as images, complete in
themselves requiring no biographical support or explanation. From this study
of Sri Chinmoy's lyrics of despair we have seen that he traverses the range
of emotions attendant on this state, yet ever beneath the mask of the anonymous
and representative lyric-I. For it is the embracing and universal Self, not
the divided and fragmentary self that is caught, enshrined, in his brief
song-like lyrics. We see him as a poet for whom the inner world is more real
than the outer world, for whom the abundance and richness of the inner life
fill volumes where the outer life fills but pages and whose "face" is made
up of the lines and features that we "read" metaphorically as poems