A Soul Talks to God

Notice that this opening poem is an innovative sonnet, a combination of the Italian and the English forms. It employs the required fourteen lines, but instead of the exact octave and sestet of the Italian, it offers two sestets, and then the final two lines are a couplet resembling the English form, all with a unique rhyme scheme of aabbcc ddefgg hh. Of course, "born" / "grown" and "to give" / "receive" are slant rhymes.

The content or subject of "Consecration" is the speaker's offering his words to God. He employs the metaphor of laying flowers on an altar to God, flowers symbolizing the devotee's love and devotion. This poem represents the style we can expect from further samples, basically traditional, although each poem varies in form and subject; each poem is a meditation and prayer devoted to God--the yogi's Divine Beloved, also referred to as the Heavenly Father, Divine Mother, or Holy Friend.

The poet/devotee observes the Divine in nature. In "One That's Everywhere" the speaker says, "The wind plays, / The tree sighs, / The sun smiles, / The river moves. / Feigning dread, the sky is blushing red / At the sun-god's gentle tread. / Earth changes robes / Of black and starlight night / For dazzling golden light." From the pantheistic perspective, on which the yoga philosophy is based, everything is God; God is immanent in all creation, so the sun may be called a "sun-god," without giving connotations of sun worship, but rather recognition that the sun is a spark of God. The speaker continues,

Dame Nature loves herself t'array
In changing seasons' colors gay.
The murmuring brook e'er tries to tell
In lisping sounds so well
Of the hidden thought
By inner spirit brought.

The "inner spirit" is always the motivator of "Dame Nature"; thus the inner spirit is the reason for changing seasons that provide us with the beauty of color and sound. And about sound, "The birds aspire to sing / Of things unknown that swell within." And although the birds are driven by this inner spirit, yet it is the human being who is capable of fully rendering the cosmic consciousness of God:

But man first speaks in language true-
Both loud and clear, with meaning new-
Of That all else before
Had failed to full declare,
Of One that's everywhere.

While all of nature speaks of its Creator, the human being is the first to understand clearly that he/she is

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