Page 80

In "The Absolute" this universal quality convinces us that the poem's major statements own a breadth and grandeur which is the soul's by right and the poet's only in so far as we accept him to be the representative of our own potentialities. Thus, at the last, the poem passes into our consciousness as our own achievement and our life of becoming and being is tinted with the glow of epic greatness. This is the "upper limit" in literature of which Frye speaks:

In some religious poetry, for example at the end of the Paradiso, we can see that literature has an upper limit, a point at which an imaginative vision of an eternal world becomes an experience of it.[52]

 
It is evident from "The Absolute" that Sri Chinmoy does not feel the need to qualify or support his imaginative vision with factual argument in order that the reader may be given "proof' of its authenticity. Like other mystics in his company, he perceives that the language most appropriate to the mystical experience is that of intuition and not of reason. It is intuition alone that can pierce the world's outer forms to the abiding Reality beneath. The ascendance of intuition in mystical poetry, combined with the frequent and related lack of any formal conflict or argument, often results in a kind of poetry in which a plain statement of God-union may be further illumined by an accretion of metaphors-as a gem's brilliance is reflected in each of its separate myriad surfaces. An excellent example of this incremental effect is "Revelation":