A SEA JOURNEY

Sri Chinmoy’s poem for November 9th is actually a fervent prayer expressed in the form of a rhyming couplet:

O my heart-boat-Navigator,
Make me Your sleepless servitor.

       Images of journeys, particularly water journeys, are ever-present in Sri Chinmoy’s poems. Like Rabindranath Tagore, who invokes God as the Ferryman or Boatman, Sri Chinmoy frequently calls upon God as the Boatman, Pilot or Captain. In this couplet, he strives for an even greater precision by using the epithet “Navigator”. It suggests that God is not merely at the helm of our life-boat, but that He is planning and directing its route. To some extent, the word also conjures up images of the ancient voyages of exploration, where sailors left the Old World behind in their search for uncharted lands. In this case, God is navigating the heart-boat towards an ultimate destination which He alone knows.

         In the first line, the poet coins a triple compound to solve an otherwise awkward and intrinsically unpoetic construction. Instead of the cumbersome “O Navigator of the boat of my heart”, he rearranges the word order, eliminates the weakest linking words and tightens the rhythm, so that each word in the triple compound receives an equal amount of accentual weight, creating in effect a molossus (or ternary foot consisting of three strong beats).

          Again, this triple compound highlights one of the basic questions that confronts most translators of Sri Chinmoy’s poetry and will continue to challenge commentators on the poems: if a descriptive image has been incorporated into a compound, does it perform a weaker and essentially inferior role to that of the dominant noun? In “heart-boat”, for example, is the heart simply boatlike, or is the poet saying something more?

           Essentially, the question is: does a seer-poet simply use his imaginative powers to attain another level of reality, or does he “see” this other level as tangibly and indubitably as other human beings perceive things on the material plane?

           Speaking as a seer-poet, Sri Chinmoy clearly favours the latter. “A seer-poet is he who envisions the ultimate Reality,” he has written. The role of the seer-poet is thus to foresee this Reality in advance of its realisation.

           Such being the case, the heart-boat and its divine Navigator must actually exist on an inner level, albeit a level which we, as readers, may not have reached. The heart is not merely boat-like; it is a boat. God is not only like a navigator; He is the Navigator of this heartboat—
and the fact that He is also the King of our heart, or the Jewel of our heart, or any of the other exquisite appellations by which He is known, does not lessen the impact of the poet’s vision.

       Moreover, the poet’s triple compound, with its insistent rhythmic beat, encourages us, one might almost say dares us, to claim this vision as our own, to realise it within the context of our own imaginations. “Imagination,” Sri Chinmoy reminds us, “is the precursor of reality.” If one can dare to believe in the actuality of the compound, then the poet will have prepared us inwardly for the prayerful cry of the second line:

“Make me Your sleepless servitor.”

           Interestingly, the slightly archaic “servitor” suggests that the speaker aspires to a far more active role than that of “passenger”. We all are passengers, passive witnesses of our life’s journey, but the speaker wants to be sleeplessly conscious of all God’s movements in his life and to serve God in whichever way he can. The sincerity and urgency of his cry are underlined by his choice of the most elementary of verbs: “make”. Where another poet might have seized this opportunity to introduce a colourful or striking verb, specially considering that it is the only verb in the poem, Sri Chinmoy selects one of the most basic and fundamental words of the English language. Again, he is obviously not striving for poetic effect. Rather the very simplicity of his word choice bears testimony to the genuine nature of his vision.