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As the poet enumerates his experiences further in the second stanza these associations are carried forward in a number of ways. The line "In tune with Him, I sport and sing:' creates the composite image of the soul as a singing bird, while the mysterious, "I own the golden Eye of the Supreme" imparts to its divine audience, the sun, a dynamic and responsive function. Some lines from Henry Vaughan's "Cock-crowing" offer a special insight into this image:
Can souls be track'd by any eye
But his, who gave them wings to flie?
... make no delay,
But brush me with thy light, that I
May shine unto a perfect day,
And warm me at thy glorious Eye![55]
In the final stanza of Sri Chinmoy's poem, the poet replaces the diminutive image of the soul-bird with the image of the soul as an enormous tree: "I am the root and boughs of a teeming vast." The expanse that we know to be God is now filled by the self from its source-the root-to its uttermost limits-the boughs. The poet has employed this analogy of the tree, I believe, to emphasise the expansive nature of God-union. A perennial symbol of man's spiritual aspiration, his constant growth in the Infinite, the tree has its roots in the earth, but its branches reach upwards to the highest. In another sense, this image evokes the mythological tree of life that grows in paradise.
"The necessary mark of mystical symbolism," writes Mary Anita Ewer, "is found in the consciousness of analogy.[56] Through the cluster of images in this lyric Sri Chinmoy is able to dramatise the heart of his experience of God-union. From them the poem receives considerable rhythmic energy and this energy gathers to a climax in one final pronouncement: "The Supreme and I are one; all we outlast." As in "The Absolute" the poet celebrates the sovereignty or kingship of the soul that has achieved God-union in terms that outreach the scope of the lyric.
Both "Apocalypse" and "Immortality" also align themselves with this group of "royal" poems, that is, poems that dilate on the experience of God-union. In them the self that has been engulfed by God attains a world-wideness that is all-inclusive.
