When I Consider How My Light is Spent

That Milton’s Sonnet XIX is now generally regarded as his contemplation over the implications of his blindness is less about the poem itself—Milton never actually uses the word “blind” or “vision” and composed the poem more than decade after his vision loss—and more about the efforts of a well-intentioned but misdirected editor of what became a standard folio of Milton’s poems published nearly a century after his death who opted to hang the title “On His Blindness” on the sonnet. The title stuck and in turn generated centuries of readings that explored the poem as an early defense of the abilities of the disabled in its suggestion that the disabled, even though limited in what they can do, nevertheless serve God in this life of non-doing, to paraphrase the much celebrated and oft-quoted closing line about just standing around and waiting.

Apart from the troubling logic that apparently assumes the blind do nothing but stand around waiting (ironic given that Milton himself would produce his greatest and most enduring works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, long after he had lost his vision), the reading of the poem as a rueful look at the anxieties of a major poet who must now abandon that craft because his blindness actually flies in the face of Milton’s own biography. At the time Milton lost his vision, he was hardly a major poet. He was at best known in more educated circles as a poet of some minor works, most notably the elegy Lycidas. Milton’s reputation at the time rested almost entirely on his role as a functionary for the civilian government of Oliver Cromwell. He represented the insurgent Cromwell government across Europe as a kind of ambassador-at-large, holding court with the intelligentsia and the artists of numerous European countries as a way to bolster the international opinion of Cromwell and his radical theocracy. His loss of vision, of course, curtailed that hectic travel schedule—but it was certainly more curtailed by the fall of the Cromwell government itself and Cromwell’s hasty execution in 1658.

If the sonnet is not directly interested in the poet bewailing his sudden disability and working through that anxiety to a position that appears to endorse passivity and inactivity as life-enough, what is Milton investigating? The vocabulary of the sonnet, particularly the repeated use of the word “light” as well as the freighted terms “talent,” suggests that Milton, drawing on his vast familiarity with Christian Scripture, alludes to the celebrated gospel parable (Matthew 5) in which Christ cautions his apostles not to keep their talent hidden, not to keep their light under a bushel basket, but rather to share their talent as way to make better the community of God:

Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father (Matthew 5).

If light then refers less to eyesight and the light the physical eye perceives and more about the duty of each person to share their “Talent” (Line 3) within their community as a way of sustaining and compelling that community, then the poet is looking at his life now half-spent and wondering whether he has sufficiently used that light, that talent, or whether God will be disappointed in his efforts, not as a poet, but as a globe-trotting diplomat for the Cromwell government. As a Christian, the poet speaks of his deep and abiding anxiety not that he will not be able write poems anymore or visit the crowned heads of Europe but that he has not lived up to Christ’s command. My soul, the poet admits, still serves my God, still bent, or inclined, to His presence, but does my life itself please God? I am aging, my talents will ebb with the inevitable approach of death, my energy will flag, my efforts will invariably collapse into irony. What then? Can my God expect me to dazzle the community with my light when He himself has created fallible creatures prone to the erosion of time?

This is far more than the self-serving lamentation of a minor poet who has lost his eyesight and fears he can no longer read or write verse. This is nothing less than a kind of jeremiad that recalls some of the most stirring Psalms in the Old Testament: how do I give glory to my God? What happens, the poet asks, when our efforts can no longer magnify and please the Creator God? Not just poets, but everyone from laborers to teachers to farmers to kings. How will God not be diminished, offended when we edge into decrepitude and uselessness?

Therein rests the heresy that the second half of the poem addresses through the character of patience. To imagine, as the anxious speaker in the first eight lines, that his puny efforts, whatever those efforts might be, could somehow, at any level, please God or sustain God or magnify God is to posit that our efforts, our works, can somehow earn salvation, can somehow surprise God. To assume, as the poem does in the first eight lines, that our efforts can somehow even interest the omnipotent God defined by Scripture is to limit God’s omnipotence. If a person can earn salvation through works, then that would infer that God does not see all, know all.

Thus, patience reassures the anxious speaker (not so much a poet as any Christian) that God does not need our works to magnify his majesty. God is not concerned with achievements, accomplishments, actions: “Who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best” (Lines 10-11). Whatever our position in life, whatever our level of service, whatever the magnitude of our resume, God cannot be impressed. What satisfies God is the service a person provides to God, a life measured not by achievements but rather by steadfast faith. Patience reassures the speaker, even as thousands go running about the globe attending to the furious busy-ness of their secular lives, God is impressed only by the depth and reach of faith. Even if that person simply stands and does nothing, a ridiculous extreme, patience understands, that person would be sustained by faith.

Thus, the poem chronicles the emotional and spiritual crisis of a Christian—it begins in anxiety but closes in reassurance; begins with insufferable egoism but ends in humility; begins in doubt and ignorance but closes in a difficult but radiant epiphany.