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Sri Chinmoy's title Ten Thousand Flower-Flames bridges the gap between this great tradition and our times. It has its genesis in the opening poem where the poet declares his ambition
to sow the seeds
of ten thousand flaming-flower poems
The inner psychic world of the poet houses the seeds of his ten thousand poems. There, beyond the empirical level of experience with all its limitations of form, the greater portion of his design rests inert, its immense power as yet unmanifested. Sri Chinmoy infers that each poet has this silent creative source and, if he but touches on it, he would perceive the seed-forms of the imagination. A true poet is he who, having a deep and recondite realisation of the soul, is able to draw from the well-springs of the imagination essential insights and shape them into meaningful expressions. He awakens the depths with his subtle transforming power. He gathers together his seed-ideas and sows them in his poems, where they attain their final blossomed perfection. This process may be seen as a transfer of energy for the poety is actually sowing inside the hearts of his readers the seeds of action, inner action, the basic power that will transform and uplift the human consciousness.
The poems of Ten Thousand Flower-Flames are, the poet implies, a garland-like offering to God. At the same time, Sri Chinmoy describes the poems as "flaming." From the ancient Vedic fires-symbolic of wisdom-truth was believed to emerge in all its brilliance and purity The poet who could capture this truth in its original power and simplicity was able to impart something of its burning quality to his utterance and his words could thus penetrate men's hearts directly, like a searing flame. It is in this light, as flames won from the wisdom-fire, that Sri Chinmoy invites us to consider his poems.
Poems as flowers; poems as flames-the images fuse into "flower-flames," a forceful concentration of the multiple beauty and lambent energy of these creations.
In several of the poems under review, Sri Chinmoy would seem to offer an illustration of these two major images. He compares the relationship of the flame to the fire and of the seed to the flower to the eternal relationship of the finite to the Infinite:
