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Behold, with His Flute in His Hand,
My Beloved slowly is coming to the bank of
    my life-river
In today's morning sweet.
All my life's hopes,
All my life's love,
To Your Power-red Feet divine I offer,
And to You I bow and bow.[83]

The associations of such lines with their classical model are tenuous. We are filled with the awareness of a divine flute player but this figure remains unspecified and open to our creative interpretation:

Yonder who plays once again his flute?
Who is that God-intoxicated mendicant?
I shall offer him my life's ignorance-ink.
Ali, I now see him approaching me
With his inner light.
His smiling face will discover my heart's emptiness.[84]

Sri Chinmoy's debt to the older pad writers may be detected more in the tone of his songs than in their circle of themes and images. At times the language of ecstatic surrender passes imperceptibly into the language of praise. Such poems would seem almost to sing themselves:

View: I SING, I SMILE