MUSINGS OF A SEER-POET: A STUDY OF THEMES IN SRI AUROBINDO’S SONNETS

Abstract

           Sri Aurobindo wrote regularly both in prose and poetry in his varied career. As a poet, he displayed immense capability in handling the English language and metre. As a poet he wrote narrative poems, poetic plays, a series of remarkable experiments in quantitative metres, and the monumental ‘futurist’ epic, Savitri. He experimented with almost all forms of poetry and prosody, and there is nothing wrong to call him primarily an ‘experimentalist’ and a ‘modernist’. His later poetry (1937-50) is largely sonnets and poems. During his days of retirement in his Ashram, Sri Aurobindo wrote a number of mystical-meditative lyrics published as Poems Past and Present (1946) and Last Poems. Last Poems is mostly a collection of sonnets. Most of the sonnets were written between 1936 and 1944. This paper explores the various themes of these sonnets, in brief.