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The importance these poets place upon nature as the mediator between man and God finds its parallel in the poems of Sri Chinmoy. Like them, he does not subordinate nature to a mere decorative role, but insists on her great function as the index of man's inner progress. Nature, according to his view, is symbolic of an underlying fixed reality and it is this essence which he is concerned to portray and not all the endless variations and details of natural forms. Consequently, we shall not draw from the poems a wealth of information regarding surface appearances as we would with poets such as Hopkins and Roethke. What we do uncover are the essential qualities and typical features of the most basic and universal of natural forms-the ani-mals, the colours, the general components of landscape, the cosmic symbols and the broad phases of the day These are the ageold symbols that man has used from primitive times and, in each culture, the names he has evolved for them have been among the first words of the language. Within the English language, words such as bird, cow, tree, dawn, light, earth and fire, for example, are Middle English words that have come down to us from Old English. They comprise the original core words of our language. Commenting upon language as an "archive of history," Emerson writes:
Though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolised the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.[4]
To a poet, the first words of a language contain in themselves the most sublime poetry because they were coined by man in his moments of inspiration, when he beheld the universe with uncluttered eyes.
Clearly, Sri Chinmoy does not consider these Old English derivatives to have lost their language power and this fact becomes more evident when we observe that he often uses such words with stark simplicity unadorned by adjectives, isolated in self-sufficiency
