23 pages • 46 minutes read
John MiltonWhen I Consider How My Light is Spent
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1673A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Light
As a religious sect, as a culture, and as a people, the Puritans were decidedly restless in a material world. Every element of the world around them dazzled with quiet testimony to the power and glory of a God whose omnipotence, whose majesty would be too much to bear if ever glimpsed directly. The Puritans could not endure for the world to be even for a moment only what it is. For a Puritan apologist such as Milton to shape the sonnet around the metaphor of a man who fears he has squandered, even lost his light, would be to use light as more than a literal representation of failed eyesight. Light, within the Puritan culture, symbolizes illumination, wisdom, insight corrected to and directed by alignment with the glories of the Creator God: See the world not for what it is but for what God is.
Thus, as a chronicle of the journey into illumination, the reclamation of the light that matters, the poem begins in darkness and closes in light. It is not an easy journey. When the poet fears his light is spent, that is misspent, by focusing too narrowly on his physical disability and the years that have passed, he has become too taken by his own position within God’s creation. He perceives that his disability has encouraged ignorance. He has confused his loss of physical light to the far more complicated loss of spiritual illumination. He has given in to the powerful sway of impertinence, the gravest sin back to Lucifer (whose name means “light-bringer” and who would later drive Milton’s powerful epic Paradise Lost). He has forgotten his place when he laments that, now unable to perform as he once performed, God might somehow be lessened, diminished. That arrogance represents a far more grievous loss of light than his blindness. And it is at the moment that patience intervenes and readjusts the poet, brings him into the light of wisdom. They serve him best, patience counsels, who are steadfast in faith.
Patience
In the sonnet’s closing six lines, it is patience who brings to the anxious poet the reassuring insight into the Christian cosmos and realigns the poet’s all-too-limited and very human perceptions. The Puritans frequently elevated virtues (and sins) to personified, allegorical figures that embodied the essence of otherwise spiritual, abstract ideals. To gift insight to a character identified as a virtue, then, would be in keeping with traditional Puritan writing.
But Milton’s patience is unusual for two reasons. First, the assumption would be that the voice of reassuring insight might be named Wisdom or Faith or, perhaps, Truth. But patience? The suggestion is that by using patience as the driving virtue, Milton reassures his reader that wisdom is not external, that insight does not have to brought to a person like some visitation by an angel or a supernal specter. If that person is patient, if that person allows the power and glory of God to express itself, then wisdom will crack through the darkest ignorance. It is not a matter of prayer and waiting for wisdom to come. Rather, the poet counsels patience, that is, he allows the truth to find its way to expression, a reassuring affirmation of the power of the individual to drive toward the embrace of salvation, to suffer, yes, but to survive that suffering. As a scholar of languages and linguistics would know, the word “patience” comes from Latin roots that mean to endure, to suffer.
But more curious is Milton’s decision not to abide by the convention of Puritan allegorical wisdom literature and capitalize patience as if patience were an entity unto itself, a character. Only in later bowdlerized versions did patience become capitalized. Patience is not some outside force, not some emissary sent by a distant and powerful God. Patience is like all virtues—faith, hope, generosity, compassion—an in-dwelling and ever-present kinesis. Thus, Milton uses patience to symbolize the ability of every individual to render appropriate worship to a God who is more than willing to wait for His creations to discover their place within His luminous cosmos.
Talent
For a contemporary reader, Milton’s use of the word talent can easily be understood as a skill, a gift a person has through which that person secures a livelihood, defines their identity, and centers their entire existence. Athletes, accountants, artists, entrepreneurs, doctors, custodians, and presidents, every individual taps into a talent and finds in that talent the reward of personal integrity and community acceptance.
Drawing on a conception of talent that Christ defined to his apostles (and that Matthew recorded in the parable of the talents, Matthew 25), Milton sees talent less as an expression of individual identity and more as a gift rendered by an all-knowing master God, a God certain that the talent would be sufficient for the person to find fulfillment to give direction and purpose to the lonely pilgrimage that is life. It is in losing this theological perception of talent and elevating the egoistic perception that the poet finds himself anxious, uncertain, and lost. If I can no longer express my talent, how will God not be displeased with me? I understand my talent is my expression of faith and that without being able to express that skill, God will certainly be diminished. To use the simplest level of reading, the poet asks how can I please God as a poet if I cannot see to write?
Well, you can’t. But the good news is your poems did not impress God either. For the Puritan culture, talent did not define (or limit) an individual, nor did talent please God, nor did the expression of a talent create expectations of rewards from God. What a person does could never be confused by what a person is. Talent does not maintain the purpose of the everyday world. Talent is like the words of a prayer—without the faith behind it, sustaining it, talent is meaningless performance, movement without motion, and energy without conviction.
Related Titles
By John Milton
