Sri Chinmoy Poetry

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Page 108


The poet has begun to establish a movement towards that unity of the human
spirit which embraces more than thought alone.
If a man exists, it is by the force of his entire being-the rational,
spiritual, historical and metaphysical impulses that together constitute evolving
man. This wider scope becomes further apparent in the third stanza, where
the poet asserts that he exists by virtue of the fact that his soul recognises
its own eternal nature, extending far beyond the limits of the present. In
Cartesian terms, it is a recognition of the impossibility of existing unless
our soul existed previously Finally, in the last stanza, the poet looks forward
to what he shall eventually become and proclaims that he exists because of
his life's constant self-transcendence and upward aspiration.

It is of the essence of aphoristic poetry such as this that it confronts
us with thought units so abbreviated that they can neither be paraphrased
nor reduced. Any commentary on them, therefore, must fall into the category
of exposition and, accordingly, risks some slight distortion of the poet's
original meaning. Although the purity of contour in "My Truth-Discoveries"
does not afford the amplitude of a philosophical treatise on Cogito ergo sum,
the propositional thrust of the poem is extremely powerful. It stands as
a trenchant analysis of the Cogito and a natural fulfilment of its movement.

Several features important to aphoristic poetry may be observed from this
poem. Perhaps the most obvious is that although abstractions are the currency
of the poem, they are not intertwined with complex intellectual argument.
Further, they would seem to have come from the wellspring of intuition itself
and to still be aglow with that ultimate simplicity of realisation.

A second feature stems from the limitations placed upon aphoristic poetry
in terms of length. In order that his short, pithy sentences may carry the
point, the poet instinctively turns to devices of emphasis and repetition
that are commonly associated with the rhetorical tradition in poetry.

A further characteristic of aphorism, as exemplified by this poem, is its
authority of pronouncement, its sense of finality Aphorism has for so long
been accepted as one of the highest vehicles for the revelation of wisdom
that we expect of it a certain stability in terms of its truth content. Obviously.
the poet's assertions cannot be verified within the context of his own life
because he has consciously withheld that information from us.

 

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