Long regarded as a poignant, and powerful, assertion of the dignity and integrity of those who struggle with and against physical disabilities, John Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” first published in 1673, appears to share the anxieties of a poet contemplating the implications of his blindness—Milton went blind in his early forties from glaucoma, losing his sight (the light) at a time in his life when such a disability would appear to leave him dependent and, worse, marginalized. More than two centuries before the Braille alphabet would revolutionize the cultural and social perception of the blind, Milton appears to lament how a man whose livelihood has been secured through writing can lead a worthwhile life blind.

To so narrow Milton’s argument, however, ignores the sonnet’s far weightier argument. Milton investigates not so much what it means to be blind as he does what it means to be a Christian. The poem is less about managing a disability as it is an interrogation of a complex Christian dilemma: Can a person earn salvation? The poet-theologian asks, what matters more to the bookkeeper Christian God who alone determines the fate of every Christian soul: a person’s works or a person’s faith, what a person does or what a person believes? In this, Milton reflects less on the personal tribulations of going blind and more on the relationship between the anxious and uncertain individual and the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful Christian God.

Poet Biography

John Milton’s long life (1608-1674) reflects a fundamental tension between his perception of himself as both a poet, grounded in his vast education and his deep reading of the literatures of Antiquity, and a Christian, or more specifically a Puritan Christian, part of a militant insurrectionist Christian fundamentalist sect led by General Oliver Cromwell that believed in returning Christianity to its purest roots. In 1648, Cromwell and his followers, among them Milton, actually deposed and summarily executed the British monarch, Charles I, and installed a theocratic government led by Cromwell himself, a commonwealth government that would last more than 10 years.

Milton, born to privilege and wealth, enjoyed a youth defined by a sterling education (Cambridge University) and by his love of both the Bible (he originally aspired to be an Anglican priest) and the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the vast archives of Continental literatures (he mastered more than a half dozen languages). While still in his twenties, Milton published his first poems, most notably Lycidas, an elaborate elegy for a friend from college who drowned in which he pondered difficult questions about the purpose of life and the role of God in such tragedies. These early poems earned an appreciative audience, but Milton himself was drawn far more to the emerging Puritan movement. A committed student of Biblical theology, Milton was bothered by the lax practices of the Protestant Anglican Church of England and was eager to follow General Cromwell and his call for purifying the Church. In this capacity, Milton published dozens of often inflammatory pamphlets that denounced the monarchy and pushed for freedom of the press and even called openly for revolution in the name of God. With his mastery of numerous languages, he worked as a kind of de facto diplomat for Cromwell’s insurgent government, sent to work the governments of Europe to secure their tacit support and to calm anxieties over what had quickly become an alarming revolution.

In his early forties, however, Milton’s eyesight began to falter (contemporary medical opinion is that it was most likely glaucoma), and by 1851 Milton was completely blind. Fearing that his globe-trotting days serving in the defense of Cromwell’s civilian theocracy would be ended by his disability, Milton himself turned more and more to his poetry. When the monarchy was restored in 1658, Milton was briefly imprisoned for his pivotal role in Cromwell’s insurgency. Released from prison, he retired to a country life far from the political tempests of London and dedicated himself entirely to poetry. Dictating to a phalanx of devoted secretaries, among them his own daughters, Milton completed what would become not only his representative work but as well what is widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in the English language, Paradise Lost (1667), an ambitiously conceived theological work that, in more than 10,000 lines of blank verse, recreated nothing less than the fall of Lucifer and the loss of the Garden of Eden and in turn the genesis of good and evil. That was followed three years later by a poetic work of equal scope, Paradise Regained, that traced the ministry of Christ and the triumph of good through the Resurrection.

Milton died just three years later. Despite his stature at the time as England’s most accomplished poet, Milton was buried in a modest gravesite in the churchyard of St. Giles Cripplegate, a modest Anglican church in London, under a simple marble stone and bust that identified him as the author of Paradise Lost.

Poem Text

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.”

Milton, John. “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” 1673. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

At first read, Sonnet XIX is a meditation by Milton on the implications of losing his sight at a relatively young age, the light that is spent “ere half [his] days” (Line 2) are gone. For a poet whose contemporary reputation otherwise rests largely on two ponderous and weighty epics on the Christian drama of sin and redemption, epics seldom read in their entirety anymore, Sonnet XIX is approachable Milton, at once accessible and immediate. He appears to set aside the theology and speak from his heart, from the depths of his own experience, the traumatic loss of his eyesight. The meditation is something of an internal debate, a dialogue between the poet’s soul, ever-calm and ever-patient, and his all-too-human heart, anxious and fretful, over the perception that he has lost his “light” and that as consequence his life will be diminished and, more alarming, that he will be a disappointment to his Maker.

In the poem’s opening eight lines, the poet speaks from his heart. “When I consider how my light is spent,” he begins, an assertion that he is in a meditative, reflective mood. He is pondering the implications of his lost “light” at mid-life, his world now “dark and wide” (Line 3), a reference perhaps to Milton’s lost vision but not necessarily limited to such a narrow reading. After all, the poem’s most likely date of composition, the mid 1650s, would be more than 10 years after Milton himself had lost his eyesight, suggesting the poet has greater concerns. And should Milton have wanted the poem to be about his blindness, he could certainly have used the word to specify the argument.

In Line 3, he speaks of his one “Talent” (capitalized) that would be “death” to hide, a skill or competence gifted to him presumably by the Creator God who would be displeased and disappointed should that talent no longer be exercised. The poet fears that his singular Talent, presumably writing, is now “useless” (Line 4), all but lost to him because of his blindness. Despite his soul, otherwise animated by God’s saving grace—his “Soul,” he says, is “more bent / To serve therewith my Maker (Lines 5-6)—he fears the dark implications of his inability to express God’s grandeur through the gift of his writing. Is God, then, the poet’s heart asks anxiously, expecting him to write, now? In a rhetorical question, the speaker asks “fondly” (Line 8), which in this case means foolishly (knowing the answer), how can God expect him to pursue his writing when he has been denied his eyesight. Certainly, the speaker assumes, God cannot. But if the speaker wastes his talent, then surely God will cast him into the eternal dark that is perdition.

It is at that point verging on an emotional meltdown that the poet’s heart is answered by his soul, identified as patience. It is patience who reassures the now anxious poet that God, in his omnipotence, in his cosmic glory, surely does not depend on the scribblings of a poet to sustain that majesty: “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts” (Lines 10-11). Patience reassures the troubled poet that God is unmoved by any person’s acts, that those who “best / Bear [their] mild yoke” (Lines 10-11) serve God best. God is not impressed by showy actions, not swayed by assertions of individual talent or skill but rather by the determined effort to embrace the life given by the Creator. Yes, certainly thousands “at his bidding” (Line 12) speed all over the world, busy doing what they perceive God commands them to do, but that busy-ness is not what impresses God. God is not impressed by such an assertive show of talent; God is impressed by the faith of the individual.

So, patience reassures the troubled heart that “They also serve [God] who only stand and wait” (Line 14). Though patience might sound facetious, patience does not mean that the blind—or any Christian for that matter—simply stand around and wait for death and judgment. Rather the point is that even at that extreme, even if a Christian literally does nothing but stand and wait, that Christian, if they believe, if they are committed to their faith in God, that depth of faith alone will glorify and please God.