The sonnet-a-day challenge continues with an encounter with John Milton - puritan, revolutionary, father of the political poem in English, and possibly my favourite among our poets so far.
As Shakespeare came to the end of his career, John Milton was a youth whose Protestant sympathies alienated him from his father. Radical and religious where Shakespeare appears to have been conservative and agnostic, Milton is known for his great post-Cromwellian epic, Paradise Lost.
As Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, Milton was a relatively important public figure during the period of the Republic. He wrote prose on highly-charged public topics including free speech, divorce and the execution of the king (he was in favour of all three!) And later we’ll see that he writes some of the earliest ‘political poetry’ in English.
But today we’ll look at one of his most personal poems, dealing with his distress at the loss of his sight and the resultant inability to serve God through his work. ‘On His Blindness’ strikes a new note in English lyric poetry – though the voice and its rhetoric owes a great deal to the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. It works through an argument, it sees both sides, it wrestles with ramifications. As with ‘Th’expense of spirit…’, the octave/sestet architecture struggles with the syntax of the argument, with the turning-point coming not at line nine, but half a line above when patience butts in to calm the internal dialogue.
William Hazlitt thought Shakespeare’s sonnets ‘overcharged and monotonous’, but believed that ‘Milton's Sonnets […] have more of this personal and internal character than any others [and are] truly his own in allusion, thought, and versification.’ It’s hard to disagree that we are listening to a vivid, strong, individual voice in real distress.
On His Blindness
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,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."
More about Milton here