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Even without a knowledge of the melody one can hear that the words still wear the garment of song. In the English version, as in the Bengali, the phrases bypass surface difficulties-they are brief, limpid and natural. There is a sense that the key words have been deepened by the leisurely and meditative rhythm, but there is yet a sense that the music alone shall kindle their secret life.

Sri Chinmoy's song-poems from Bengali are generally succinct, to the point of being miniature, and non-particularised. They speak in the general terms of song, the poet consciously omitting the aureate diction of many of his more formal lyrics. The singer of these true "lyrics" perceives the momentary essence of emotion as single, indivisible and perfect. The sudden transports of ecstasy are expressed by a musician's patterning of significant words and the reader is held in thrall by their magic:

Today, the flood of delight
Inundates me, my all.
All my bondage-shackles
Are smashed and broken.
No more heart-pangs,
No more darkness-life.[66]

    ………….

No, no, no! I no longer exist.
What exists is only a fragile shadow.
And that, too, has lost its existence-life
In a golden lightning spark.

The ecstatic consciousness in these two poems leaves little room for more than the most cursory self-observation. It is the indwelling self, liberated from the constraints of selfhood, which soars behind the words. To call it back from this state of absorption and ask it to account for its altered condition would be to distract it from the ecstatic experience. The lyric medium concentrates on preserving the experience intact:

Beyond speech and mind,
Into the river of ever-effulgent Light
My heart dives.
Today thousands of doors, closed for millenia,
Are opened wide.