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YOURS IS THE VICTORY SUPREME

Yours is the victory supreme,
For you have already started flying
Soulfully and unconditionally,
Phoenix-like,
From the dead ashes of repentance-torture.[11]

The first poem, with its firmness of closure and Blakean simplicity of language, contains the poet's response to his own sorrowful questionings. What he does, he reassures himself, is love God; what he is, is God's dove. This is his entire world of being and becoming, powerfully and convincingly abbreviated. If we focus on the picture of the seeker as God's dove, we recognise that it is a most apt symbol on every level: man longs most of all for peace. When he reaches out to God in love, so his life becomes the embodiment of peace. Like the biblical dove of peace, he announces that ideal harmony between Heaven and earth. There is a characteristic lightness and sweetness about this song of rapture which stems partially from the emotional cadence of the poem-at once pensive and tender-and partially from the poet's vision of man and God in intimate kinship. He has succeeded in coadunating symbol and reality to such a degree that the dove and man are realised as one entity

In the second poem, the central metaphor is that of the phoenix arising from the ashes. Only after we have fully identified ourselves with this beautiful, legendary bird, does the poet disclose that the ashes from which it has risen are not in fact those of a pyre but the self-torturings of conscience. It is a startling reversal of expectation, for repentance is an act that we associate with spiritual progress rather than with a cessation of progress. By pointedly positioning the image of this magical bird gliding soulfully upwards against the lifeless and colourless picture of the "dead ashes," the poet is able to jolt our awareness of the constricting nature of repentance. He sees repentance as prolonging the sorrow of past mistakes and thus delaying any forward movement. To escape from this narrow world is, he believes, a great victory, for only then can one show God a face unclouded by the past, "soulfully and unconditionally" set towards the golden future.