Today’s Poem: On His Blindness

John Milton’s parable of the one talent

John Milton Dictating to His Daughters, EugèneDelacroix (Wikimedia Commons)

By 1652, in the midst of an active career as the English Protectorate’s Secretary for Foreign Tongues — a job requiring him to function as, simultaneously, translator, censor, and government propagandist — John Milton (1608–1674) was completely blind. His colleague, the poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), whose “To His Coy Mistress” appeared here on February 29, served him as an amanuensis in official and private capacities, inscribing from dictation both Milton’s polemical essays and some of his poems. Later, and more famously, between 1658 and 1663, Milton also dictated his great epic, Paradise Lost, from memory, twenty lines at a time, to his daughters Mary and Deborah. 

Today’s Poem, Milton’s “Sonnet 19,” which the editor and hymn writer John Newton (1725–1807) later retitled “On His Blindness,” likely dates from the period when darkness had first fallen like a curtain, threatening to separate the writer from his work. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, in iambic pentameter, with the traditional abbaabba octet establishing the speaker’s problem, and a cdecde sestet resolving it. The poem takes as its context the scriptural parable of the talents, with the speaker imagining himself as the servant given one talent to steward.

In the Bible, this servant buries the talent and reaps the master’s displeasure. But here, the speaker pleads his cause. Can the master chastise him, when the impossible situation — desire to do “day-labour,” no daylight to do it by — is the master’s own design? “They also serve who only stand and wait,” the speaker’s better conscience, styled as “patience,” advises him ultimately. In other words, paradoxically, the “day-labor” that most pleases the master, who needs nothing from anybody anyway, is for the servant simply to wait upon his will. 

John Milton, circa 1629 (Wikimedia Commons)

The meter is consistent iambic pentameter — “When Ì consider hòw my lìght is spènt” — with two striking exceptions that underscore the ebb and surge of emotional drama in the poem. Line 4 begins not with an iamb, but with a trochee that amplifies the word lodged, as though “that one Talent which is death to hide” had stuck like a bone in the speaker’s throat. This shift of stresses also casts the next stressed syllable, the first syllable of useless, following two unstressed syllables, into higher relief. That useless is possibly the most emphatic word in the entire poem, bearing all the weight of the speaker’s despair.

Though the most probable scansion of that line is trochee-iamb-iamb-iamb-iamb, it would be possible to read it as a dactyl followed by trochees, with the last unstressed half-foot dropped, a metrical torsion that might echo the “bent”-ness of the Soul, tying itself in knots to serve its Maker. A corresponding moment occurs six lines down, in the sestet, as “patience” makes its reply: “Eìther man’s wòrks or hìs own gìfts; who bèst . . .” 

Line 10 exactly echoes the metrical pattern of that earlier line, as though to parry the speaker’s evident anger and frustration. In that moment, two lines into the sestet, the poem makes its final, decisive turn toward resignation to the divine will: the inevitable, the only possible resolution. 

---

Sonnet 19: On His Blindness

by John Milton

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.”

---