When I Consider How My Light Is Spent John Milton

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

John Milton - 1608-1674

When I consider how my light is spent,                assonance
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,      alliteration
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-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent           Patience personified
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."

allusion

https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/john-milton/sonnet-19-when-i-consider-how-my-light-is-spent-on-his-blindness#:~:text=Faith%20and%20Work,%2C%E2%80%9D%20Milton%20reflects%20on%20blindness.&text=This%20implicitly%20calls%20into%20question,through%20faith%2C%20rather%20than%20work.

When I think about how I went blind before I reached the mid-point of my life in this big, dark world; when I consider that my greatest talent—which it would kill me to hide—is now useless, even though I want more than ever to use it to serve God, to prove to him that I’ve made good use of my life, so that he doesn’t rebuke me for the way I’ve spent my life; when I think about all this, I ask, foolishly, “Does God want me to do work that requires sight after denying me that sight?” But my internal sense of patience, in an effort to stop that bad thought, quickly replies: “God doesn’t need man’s work or his gifts. Whoever best obeys God's commands serves him best. He is like a king. Thousands of people rush around at his bidding, crossing land and sea without rest. And those who simply wait for his commands also serve him.”

What is your reaction to the poem?

a) Themes?
The initial reference to "light" may also be an allusion to the biblical Parable of the Foolish Virgins. This story is usually interpreted as a call to prepare for Judgment Day, i.e. to meet God. Like the Foolish Virgins, the speaker feels as though with the loss of sight he or she has lost the capacity to commune with God, to meet God as he offers salvation.

worry, fear, uncertainty, physical and spiritual challenges of the blind. 

But, in the second half of the poem, the speaker reassures himself by arguing that God does not need human help and that there are many ways to serve him. 

-diction:

-tone:

-imagery:

-sound:  though the speaker will run into difficulties later in the poem. Moreover, the speaker here uses traditional literary devices like assonance (the /i/ sound in the first line) and alliteration (the /w/ sound at the end of line 2)—though the speaker will later largely strip the poem of those devices, favoring an unadorned (and, indeed, a more Puritan) style.

-form: iambic pentameter: “When I consider how my life is spent” is a Petrarchan sonnet. Petrarchan sonnets are often argumentative poems; poets use the form to test ideas and to quarrel with themselves. This accounts for Milton’s interest in the form: like so many Petrarchan sonnets, this poem focuses on the speaker’s internal conflicts—

The poem does diverge from the standard Petrarchan scheme in one key respect. All Petrarchan sonnets have a “volta” or a “turn.” This is the moment in the poem where the speaker changes his or her mind, begins to critique the argument he or she has made so far in the poem. Usually this moment comes between line 8 and 9, right on the border between the two parts of the poem. However, in Milton’s poem, it comes a little early: midway through line eight with: “But patience, to prevent…” The speaker basically gets impatient and jumps the gun, refuting his or her own argument before it's time to do so. This suggests that the speaker does not need time to reflect on the position presented in the first eight lines of the poem. As soon as the speaker says this blasphemous idea—that God requires work, rather than faith—the speaker knows that something’s gone wrong.

 the first line of the poem inaugurates a long sentence, which stretches until the middle of line 8. The sentence is unusually punctuated, but if one breaks it into its pieces, it has a clear conditional structure: “When I think about this… then I ask the following question.” Because of its conditional structure, and because the independent clause that completes the conditional clause is delayed for so long, virtually all of the poem’s first eight lines are arguably enjambed. (The exception is line 7, which is technically grammatically complete on its own and therefore end-stopped, even though it feels enjambed).

The result is a proliferation of caesuras: the poem’s phrases and clauses terminate in the middle of the line rather than the end. The speaker fails to calibrate the length of phrases to the length of the poem's lines, giving the poem a hectic, jerky feel. Though the poem may be a sonnet, its internal architecture reveals a speaker in crisis, unable to fully control his or her poem.

What is your understanding of the poem?
a) What is it about? 

In the first eight lines of the poem, the speaker mourns the loss of sight. Because of this blindness, the speaker feels unable to complete the work that the speaker had planned to do—and that God expects the speaker to perform. Alluding to the Parable of the Talents in the Book of Matthew

The loss of eyesight can be thought of as a physical symbol of a spiritual problem—how to best serve God—and the rest of the poem will be dedicated to working through this spiritual crisis. The second line of the poem amplifies the stakes: the speaker has gone blind and fallen into spiritual crisis, before even reaching middle age! The speaker might feel differently if this blindness had come later in life, after the speaker had accomplished more. As it is, the first two lines of the poem suggest that the speaker feels unable to use his or her capacities and talents to their full potential—a suggestion the speaker will explore in more detail in the following lines of the poem.

Just as the speaker opens in the poem in spiritual crisis, the poem itself is marked by formal tension and confusion. “When I consider...” is a Petrarchan sonnet. Like all Petrarchan sonnets, it uses just two rhyme sounds in its first eight lines, giving those lines an obsessive, churning feel: the speaker seems unable to escape from this doubt and anxiety, just as the speaker is unable to escape from the same, repetitive rhyme sounds.