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, least 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.
This sonnet begins as a private confession. Milton lost his sight in 1652 and, with it, the ability to easily use his talents as a poet (he was reliant on other people taking down dictation for the rest of his life). The syntax of the first eight lines is very complicated. It’s meant to be difficult to follow because the speaker of the poem (whom of course we think of as Milton himself) is struggling to understand why his God-given gifts have been rendered useless. The sentence twists around itself and spills over line endings. We have to read it several times. We find the situation as difficult to understand as Milton does.
In the last six lines, however, the syntax suddenly becomes much clearer. Another voice is now speaking, named as ‘patience’. Is patience a purely inner mental resource, or an inspired voice from without? There is no way of telling. But whereas the first voice was complex, confusing, and tortured, this second voice is simple, clear, and certain. Like sunlight bursting from behind a thunder-cloud to reveal a vast landscape, the subject of the sonnet suddenly expands from Milton’s personal torment to the nature of God and the duties of mankind.
The distance covered in just fourteen lines is immense. We are taken from inside the private thoughts of ‘I’ in the first line to wide lands and oceans over which ‘thousands…speed’ in the service on an infinite God. Milton hasn’t stopped after giving us an effective impression of his own emotional state. Confession isn’t enough for him, however deeply-felt and well-crafted it might be. He uses the formal properties of the sonnet (the rhyme scheme divides it into a first section of eight lines and a second section on six lines) to kick on from his opening idea and to look at things from a completely different perspective.
The speed with which his short poem expands its scope hints at a restless urgency to place even the most private thoughts of one man within a universal pattern of duty and right. This is how some of Milton’s other poems work. Paradise Lost, for example, could be described as a pair of stories about one individual’s hurt pride (Satan) and two lovers at the beginning of a relationship (Adam and Eve). By taking these characters from an important Biblical story, Milton makes their experiences of envy and love (things we have all experienced) into part of a much larger story about how we should live well in the world. The challenge Milton gives to us as readers is whether, after seeing how other people’s inmost experiences fit into a great structure of right and wrong, we can recognise the moral implications of our own lives.
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