Milton's Use of Puntuation in "On His Blindness"

Another essay on Milton for my students:

 Charles Brent Oliver

Dr. Borges

ENGL 1020 SA1

5 March 2015

 “On His Blindness”: Milton’s Punctuation

            A careful examination of Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness” reveals it to involve a masterful usage of English syntax and punctuation.  The poem of fourteen lines actually consists—in at least one of its multiple editions—of two main sentences, each of which contains within quotation marks at least one other sentence.  A close examination of how this was done, including a look at the punctuation, may reveal some of the art Milton used in making this, one of his most personal poems.

            The poem, in the edition under consideration here (from the anthology Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense), contains five marks of full punctuation: a question mark (line 7) and four periods (lines 8, 10, 11 & 14).  It also contains a colon (12), a semi-colon (13) and several commas.  The two main sentences of the poem divide it almost evenly in half: the first sentence begins in line 1 and ends three words into line eight with a period; this sentence contains another sentence within quotation marks that ends in a question mark in line seven.  The sentence that begins in line eight continues to the end of the poem.  From the second half of line 9 on, it is a quotation.  This quotation contains three separate sentences, each ending in a period.  The last of these periods ends not only the last sentence in the quotation, but also the sentence in which the quotation occurs, as well as the entire poem.

            What does this mean?  The two main sentences contain the main thought of the poem, expressed in two balanced parts: question and answer.  The first sentence—that is, the first half of the poem—expresses the speaker’s despair that he will be unable to use his “one talent” (3) to serve his “Maker” (5; notice both the allusion to the parable of the talents and the intentional capitalization of “Maker”).  The second main sentence uses the remaining 6.5 lines to give an answer to the speaker’s despair.  His “fond” (8) question about whether God can expect a man to work when he is denied the light to work by is given in quotation marks, thus including it within the main sentence that makes up the first half of the sonnet.  Similarly, the second major sentence contains three other sentences within a quotation attributed to “Patience” (8b; again, notice the unexpected capital—this time, because of the personification of a Christian virtue).  Thus does Milton pack a complex, 14-line meditation into only two sentences, containing the two conceptual halves of the sonnet.

            The interrogative sentence-within-a-sentence begins with the first word of line seven, and ends with the line’s last.  The only other clause in the poem that fills only a single line is the final clause, which makes up line fourteen.  This is a key detail.  The very point of the opening sentence and first half of the poem is the interrogative sentence it contains (the rest of that first sentence only explains why the question is asked).  Likewise, the culmination of the second sentence is the final line of the entire poem.  It is not coincidence that the single question in the poem takes up a whole line, and only one line, and that line is the seventh of fourteen, the poem’s midpoint.  It is also something other than accident that the answer to that question is contained in the only other independent clause that takes up a whole line, and that clause is the poem’s final line.  It is the poem’s resolution, the summation of the sentence in which it is found (lines 8b-14), and the answer to the question which was the burden of the poem’s first sentence.

            It is worth noting that this division of the poem into two main sentences essentially matches the two other ways of dividing the poem.  As a sonnet, it is 14 lines long, so an opening sentence that stop midway through line eight almost perfectly divides the poem into two halves of 7 lines apiece.  Also, the rhyme scheme of the poem binds the first 8 lines together into an octet (rhyme scheme: abbaabba), while leaving the final six lines as a sestet (cdecde).  Thus, these three methods of organization—lineation, rhyme scheme, and syntax—coincide as much as possible (one cannot rhyme together only seven lines; seven is prime and cannot be symmetrically divided).  It is their failure to coincide perfectly that draws the readers on, giving them no place to rest before reaching the poem’s end.

            More could be said here, but this is sufficient, and what has been written above is perhaps too repetitious already.  The point, of course, is to see how Milton has constructed a poem of two almost perfectly balanced halves, which ask and then answer a question of great importance to him, the blind bard: what does a man do when he feels he cannot use the talent he knows he dare not refrain from using?  His sonnet places the question and answer at the seventh and fourteenth lines, giving an entire line over to each, thus centering the two halves of the poem on those two lines.  The one imperfection seems to be that the final line is not itself a sentence…why?  The answer, briefly, is that some other editions (such as that found in The Norton Introduction to Literature) make it so.  Whatever other evidence or arguments there may be on the matter, the details considered here would argue strongly for the punctuation of line 14 as its own sentence.  It definitely would seem more in keeping with the parallel structure build into the poem itself.

Works Cited

Milton, John. “On His Blindness.” Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense.

            Instructor’s ed. Thomas R. Arp & Greg Johnson eds. Boston: Thomson-Wadsworth,

            2006. 783-84.

Milton, John. “[When I consider how my light is spent].” The Norton Introduction to

            Literature. Shorter 11^th ed. Kelly J. Mays ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013. 893.

 

 

 

Milton's Blindness and His Great Responsibility

Here we have another essay written for my students, but it’s free for anyone to enjoy.

Brent Oliver

Dr. Wells

ENGL 1020 SA1

14 March 2016

The Agon of Art & Experience in a Sonnet by Milton

            In the study of poetry, we are often cautioned by our teachers to recall that the speaker of a poem, like the narrator of a novel, is a voice invented by the poet and not the poet himself—or at least, not necessarily.  However, a poet is in no way forbidden from making the speaking voice of a poem a vehicle for his own thoughts and feelings.  The most obvious example of this may be prayers and hymns, whether they be ancient psalms, the poetry of John Donne, or the work of the latest contemporary Christian artist.

            John Milton’s sonnet often referred to as “On His Blindness” is one example of a poet’s use of his poetry to express his own experience, although it might be more accurately termed a meditation than a prayer.  In it, the voice we hear speaking is very much Milton’s own, and the experience expressed is anything but fictional.  The year was 1652, and Milton, a reader (in multiple languages) so voracious that he is believed to have read everything in print in the English language, had gone blind, rendering him unable to read or write on his own.  In his sonnet, Milton captures the terror of his situation:

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide; (lines 1-6)

            With his “light…spent,” Milton is but a useless candle; and his great loss is not that he cannot read, but that “that one talent which is death to hide [is] / Lodged with me useless.”  His terror is apparent in his verbal echoing of the Parable of the Talents (Mat. 25.14-30); for he speaks not of “my only talent,” but of “that one talent which is death to hide,” clearly suggesting a possible identification between himself and the one-talent man in the parable, that “wicked and slothful servant” (25.26), who was “cast…into outer darkness…[where] there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (25.30).  In contrast to that servant, Milton declares his “soul more bent / To serve.”

            Hence, his question, “fondly ask[ed]” (Milton 8): “Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?” (7).  In his earnest desire and confusion, Milton, desperate to “present / My true account,” takes up the same rhetorical stance as St. Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 11, where in order to argue his qualifications as an Apostle, he speaks without restraint and repeatedly states “I speak as a fool” (2 Cor. 11.23) or the like.  In the same way, Milton’s question is asked “fondly” or foolishly, so great is his boldness.

            And like Job, Milton receives a response; not from God, but from the personified virtue of “Patience,” whose reply has the same basic thrust as God’s repeated “where were you…?” questions in the latter part of Job, and a similar effect (Milton 8-14; cf. Job 38ff.).  Her purpose is “to prevent” what the poem’s speaker characterizes as a “murmur,” a word of negative connotation which has been used in English to describe the grumblings of the Israelites against God (1 Cor. 10.10; Ex. 16.7-8; Num. 14.27, 36; 16.11; 17.5) since Tyndale’s translation of 1534.

            The final irony of the poem is, of course, the poem itself.  The conclusion of the poem is that sententious sentence, “They also serve [N.B. the repetition of this important word and concept] who only stand and wait” (Milton 14), and it is meant as a comfort to the speaker (and the poet) and all those like him for whom Luke 12.48 is a terrifying verse: “ unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required” (KJV).  The grand irony is that this meditation in which Patience comforts the speaker in his inability to serve actively itself takes the form of a brilliantly constructed sonnet in which the poet, Milton, appears to surmount his own dilemma of uselessness by demonstrating that blindness has not rendered his pen impotent.  The opening octet of the poem contains Milton’s presentation of his problem, while the solution is articulated in the following sestet.  The two are strongly linked, since the transition from question to answer occurs at the midpoint of line 8, and—at least in some editions—they are linked by a semicolon, making them two halves of a single sentence; with each half containing the other sentences that compose it (there are, after all, three full stops and a question mark within this text) through the method of quotation.

            And so Milton, in composing this sonnet, gives voice to his fear—a fear with which many a Christian can sympathize—and crafts a wise resolution to his—to our—problem, embodying it in a line impossible to forget.  And yet, in the end, did Milton really need that comfort if he could still write like this?  After all, Milton’s great epics, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes (the last featuring a blinded protagonist) were still yet to come.  Apparently, Milton did not have to stand and wait forever.

 Works Cited

The Holy Bible (King James Version).  Print.

Milton, John.  “[When I consider how my light is spent].”  The Norton Introduction to

            Literature. Shorter 11^th ed. Kelly J. Mays ed.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,  2013. 

            893.  Print.

Tyndale, William.  Trans.  Tyndale’s New Testament.  1534.  Ed. David Daniell.  New Haven,

            CN: Yale UP, 1989.  Print.