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The importance of poetic restraint in cultivating a language of wonder is clear. The co-existence of restraint or tact and a seeming spontaneity of expression within a simpler style like that of Sri Chinmoy's songs is elucidated by Stein:

... mastery of the plain style presupposed discipline, a controlled integration of materials and a controlled relationship between the materials and the man giving them expression. The results were marked by naturalness and ease ... The naturalness and ease were the product somehow of discipline; they were not superimposed and were therefore not detachable; nor could they be explained as a form of illusion: somehow they were really there, intrinsic, through and through.[73]

This quality of ease-in-discipline is at once apparent in the lyrics of Sri Chinmoy. It provides for the "controlled integration," according to the demands of theme and purpose, of all the various features of the lyric form: its brevity; its concentration on the curve of emotion; the author's refusal to supply details of character and history; his careful interpenetration of the universal and the particular, the sacred and the secular. The lyric, and especially the lyric of the plain style, is governed by proportion and moderation. Hence, what emerges as ease-in-discipline is a direct reflection of taste and refinement on the aesthetic level and an inner poise on the personal level. The result is a mode of expression in which even rhetorical figures may be absorbed without stiffness or self-consciousness. Consider, for example, the following poem from My Flute:

MY FATHER-SON

0 Supreme, my Father-Son,
Now that we two are one
And won by each other, won,
Nothing remains undone.[74]