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One is reminded of the absorptive note Whitman catches in his "Song of Myself":

My ties and ballasts leave me... I travel.... I sail... my elbows rest in the sea-gaps,
I skirt the sierras .... my palms cover continents, I am afoot with my vision.[26]

 
Filled with an inner illumination, the speaker in Sri Chinmoy's poems sees that everything around him is composed of light, that creation itself is a play of light through different shapes and forms which seem to tremble on the point of dissolving back into light. This evanescent effect enables the poet to suggest that the light within him is also around him. Union with God is realised as a blending of light:

In the garden of Love-Light,
In silence-dream,
0 Beauty Eternal!
This heart of mine is in Your embrace.[27]


The poet's choice of a garden as a spatial metaphor for "LoveLight" seems to refer directly to Paradise a Persian word which originally meant "enclosed garden." Sri Chinmoy invokes this paradisaical context to add that extra dimension to his portrayal of a present state of rapture. Yet, he does not allow it to take control of the poem and recast it as a recherche du temps perdu. The paradise of which he speaks is the inner paradise of union with God in the "silence-dream" of Beauty

Significantly, when this union with God is sundered, or when the seeker momentarily loses sight of his goal, nature assumes a hostile and even malevolent guise in direct reflection of his inner prehension of an aloof and indifferent God. In the following poems, for example, the poet furnishes us with dramatic illustration of Wallace Stevens' statement: "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within US. "[28]

 

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