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AT SHALL I SEE TOMORROW?

What did I see yesterday?
God's Compassion-Feet.
What do I see today?
God's Forgiveness-Heart.
What shall I see tomorrow?
God's Vision-Promise
In me and for me.             (no. 666)

Juxtaposed against poems which structure experience in this general way are those which focus on the finer details of the spiritual life. Each of these manifold variations of a larger theme is like a single strand that we weave into wholeness through our sympathetic reading of the poems in their entirety Sri Chinmoy uses these core themes in much the same manner that a musician utilises leitmotifs as a point of return for his composition.

One of the dominant themes of Ten Thousand Flower-Flames, for example, is that of the mind and the heart. Sri Chinmoy often uses these two words as suggestive instruments, sufficient in themselves to convey all that we are to understand by his reference. They are key words, neither ambulating nor decorative but intrinsic to the poet's meaning. Rabindranath Tagore comments that a poet is dependent upon such code expressions to reveal much that is ineffable and beyond the scope of language:

Suggestion can neither have fixed rules of grammar nor the rigid definition of the lexicon so easily available to the scholar. Suggestion has its analysable code which finds its depth of explanation in the living hearts of the people who use it. Code words philologically treated appear childish, and one must know that all those experiences which are not realised through the path of reason, but immediately through an inner vision, must use some kind of code word for their expression.[9]