Page 145

Hope-river flows, hope-river flows.
In the lap of the unknown is the river of smile.
At every moment I cry and weep with hope;
Again, it is I who dance with my Lord
In the swing of delight.[31]

In the course of their game, the seeker pursues his Beloved through all the various realms of nature and in each new environment he comes to know God in a fresh and often surprising way:

I SAW IN THE SILENCE

In the desert-silence
I saw God the Warrior.

In the forest-silence
I saw God the Lover.

In the mountain-silence
I saw God the Dreamer.

     In the ocean-silence
I saw God the Awakener.

    In the sky-silence
I saw God the Liberator.[32]

 
Here the poet condenses the infinite variety of natural landscapes into a series of single pictorial ideas-code words which release a wealth of accumulated associations. These code words become the mediators of man's changing perception of God and, hence, it follows that their adequacy in the poem is dependent upon their powerful trigger-like effect in the reader's imagination.

A similar strategy operates in "What Has Punctured Your Joy"[33] where the poet uses potent, explosive nouns drawn from features of nature in combination with negative qualities in order to dramatise the strength of such qualities:

WHAT HAS PUNCTURED YOUR JOY

What has punctured your joy?
    Not your volcano-anger,
    Not your venom-doubt,
    Not your mountain-pride,
    But your insecurity-ant.

The poem carefully constructs an exaggerated image of the immensity of anger, doubt and pride. This serves to heighten the ironic effect of the last line, for here the poet discloses that it is the tiny, nagging feeling of insecurity, more than any of these overpowering forces, which in the long run wreaks the greatest damage and under-mines joy