76 - Lyrics of Ecstasy

Lyrics of Ecstasy

[The] heart flutters among the changing things of past and future, and it is still vain. Who will catch hold of it, and make it fast, so that it stands firm for a little while, and for a little while seize the splendour of that ever stable eternity... ?

                           St. Augustine, The Confessions

In this section I shall be considering lyrics in which the soul that cries for God through prayer and envisions God through praise comes at last to behold Him directly and lose itself in Him. This summit experience is the very flower of mysticism. Again, it is an experience which may be tasted fleetingly before it is attained as a permanent state and so the title, "lyrics of ecstasy," necessarily encompasses poems of rapture as well as poems of God-union. Because of the lyric's "undiluted attention to feeling and feeling alone,"[46] we find such experiences woven into a medium that does not care to classify or even name them, a medium that seeks only to enact them in the "feeling-present" of the lyric moment. Ultimately, the lyric form goes beyond philosophical concepts by transforming them into the simple elements of intuitive knowledge.

The task of rendering the highest mystical states in poetic terms has commanded a considerable amount of Sri Chinmoy's poetic energies despite the fact that this area is traditionally one that is fraught with difficulties for poets. The literature of mystical experience has tended to expose the inherent inadequacy of language in communicating that which transcends the world of the senses. "Words were not made to dress such lightning," writes Thomas Merton.[47] The fundamental reason for this abyss between poetry and mysticism is that the mystic experience, being a union with the Infinite, always remains ineffable, beyond both words and thought. "It is," Northrop Frye comments, "by its nature incommunicable to anyone else."[48] At numerous points language simply fails. Consequently, for the mystic-poet, the foremost creative effort lies in forging a new language of the spirit to supply these gaps, a language which does not yield to its own poverty of expression but which places the reader in a position of peak accessibility to the highest inner experiences.