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