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 11th 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.
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