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Before such a poem, the critic must set aside his tools of analysis and search out a fitting language of celebration, for the poem represents not only a triumph of the spirit, the final end of man's spiritual questing, but also a triumph of expression, expression so certain and majestic as to seem a sure reflection of the central truth of the poem's utterance.
Having selected as his material the supremely "untellable" experience of the mystic, the poet initially adopts a traditional procedure of elucidation by way of negative description:
No mind, no form, I only exist;
Now ceased all will and thought.
The heavy accentual weight of a double spondee in the first line imbues the poem from the outset with a tremendous gravity. And yet, one wonders, wherein does this "I" consist that retains no vestige of thought, definition or surface consciousness? Can the poet mean to suggest a genuine speaking voice and not simply a semantic construct? The poet responds with a challenging and enigmatic formulation of self-realisation: "I am It whom I have sought." The self is at once the source and the goal of all endeavour. It fills the firmament. There is, in effect, no "not-I." The line pivots on a riddle-like root: what is it that man has never lost but always searches for? The answer, which the poet has built into his presentation, creates an intellectual paradox that not only arrests our attention but causes us ultimately to uncover a new way of seeing and knowing. Through his disguised riddle, the poet invites us to rename the world that the self embraces and, since naming is a product of knowing, his deeper and more urgent invitation is for us to change our way of knowing ourselves.[50] The poet pursues this point in the second stanza where he testifies that the realm he has entered far transcends both the knower and the known.
Unlike many lyrics, with their emphasis on the fleeting evanescent emotion, Sri Chinmoy is concerned in this poem to capture the eternity of that consciousness which has identified itself with the Absolute. It is a state rather than an emotion; a goal he has realised, rather than a fugitive vision. The nature of the poet's experience compels him to exclude certain fundamental features of the lyric mode itself: its expression of a central feeling, for example, and its location in a fluid moment-to-moment existence.
