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.
Themes
The Immutable Power of God
It might be easier for a contemporary audience familiar with the cultural attitudes toward those with disabilities to understand the poem’s thematic concern with blindness. But it is difficult for a contemporary audience, Christian or otherwise, in which the culture has so radically reconceived of the Christian God to understand the depth and conviction of the Puritan Christian perception of God’s place in the cosmos. God’s place is absolute. In a contemporary culture where religion itself has been appropriated and then weaponized by self-serving politicians and self-appointed faux-prophets, or where religion has been trivialized into a trite expression of self-promotion and ego, or where religion has been simplified to a bland ritual with little conviction save routine, Milton’s poem positions God at the center of, well, everything. His grace cannot be earned, His love cannot be assumed, His attention cannot be secured by any—any—efforts of His creations. The majesty and sovereignty of God demands the capitalized pronoun He.
At the heart of Milton’s sonnet is the reassurance, difficult for a contemporary culture to fully embrace, that God’s love is anything but unconditional. God so oversees the entirety of his Creation that no individual entity, no tiny fragment of His providential care can assert anything without His foreknowledge and approval. As the complete sovereign of a world that only exists at His will, God cannot be swayed or cajoled, much less fooled by human actions. Belief alone sustains the soul.
For the Puritans, God set aside a revenant of humanity for redemption called the elect—the rest are foredoomed to damnation. If that reads harsh for a contemporary culture, it was the stuff of jubilation for the Puritans, among them Milton, for whom that reassurance steadied their hearts during even the most difficult moments. It is the speaker’s momentary lapse of reason, his momentary lapse into ego, which drives the sonnet to its joyful peroration. How can I please my God if I am unable to do what He intends me to do? Surely, my actions can irritate God. Perhaps Milton is speaking of the limits imposed by his physical disability, but he as well is addressing any function, any work, by any person whose efforts, energies, and convictions will, indeed must, degrade over time. What happens when a farmer is too feeble to work the fields or a teacher too burned-out to continue in a classroom or a bricklayer too hobbled by an accident to work? Relax, the poet decides, God is not sustained by your efforts but rather by your faith. To believe anything else, to believe as the poet hints in the opening lines that somehow God is watching my efforts to find His reflected glory and in turn to find reward in my actions, is to fall victim to the worst sort of self-serving egoism. If you want to, just stand there, the poem advises, but have faith in your heart and your soul—and let God be God.
Handling a Disability
Generations of students and readers of Milton have found in Sonnet XIX an inspirational message for handling the potential trauma of any unexpected physical disability. The poem seems to grapple with Milton’s own shattered self-confidence in the wake of the steady decline of his vision into “uselessness” and “darkness.” Within this reading, the poem offers a rallying cry for those suddenly confronting physical limitations and struggling to adjust to a suddenly degraded self-esteem. Be of good cheer, the poem advises, your value, your self-worth cannot be impacted by the loss of something so trivial as one of the senses. Triumph over that disability.
From a Puritan point of view, however, such a thematic argument would border on grossest heresy.
Certainly, the poem wrestles with the implications of a disability, but it is hardly limited to the loss of vision. In keeping with the Puritan mindset that regarded all of the material universe as essentially spiritual (a manifestation as it is of God’s might), the disability most concerning to the poet is spiritual. The disability that challenges the speaker is not his blindness but his ego, not his flagging self-confidence but his raging self-election, not his loss of sight but his loss of humility. The opening eight lines express the poet’s concerns over the inability to express his talent, using the parable of the lamp from Matthew 5, what he terms his light. He doubts whether, despite the strong and consistent faith of his soul, God will be inclined to accept his flagging duties. How can God, he says at a moment of greatest rationalization and, in turn, self-sustaining ego, how can God expect me to stay to my duties when my talent wanes, when my confidence lapses, when my metaphoric light fades? How will God not be displeased by my dereliction of duty?
The problem, argued through the inner voice of the soul characterized as patience, is not the waning light but rather the raging ego. There exists no clear and easy remedy for this disability, whether physical blindness or for the larger lapse in performing duties. The solution, however, is to broaden perception beyond the narrow traumas of the self and realize that God cares only about what is in the soul. The poem argues not to value your self-worth in the face of trauma but rather just the opposite: Abandon your self-worth and reaffirm that the value of that self comes only from its surrender to a God uninterested in anything but the commitment to faith and belief.
The Reclamation of Joy
Joy is not something often associated with the Puritans. In fact, the Puritans are stereotyped as serial killjoys. From a public relations perspective, the Puritans suffer today from what might be called radical misbranding. John Milton was a devout Puritan—that faith, absolute and uncompromising, anchored his public life as well as his private life. The popular (mis)perceptions of the Puritans (among them the first-generation English settlers along the New England coast) center on their unforgiving judgmentalism, their hyper-intellectualism at the expense of any emotions, their dour compassionate-less self-righteousness, their radical commitment to opposing fun, their sense of their own privilege and their dismissal rebuke of all others, seen as outsiders, as spiritually inferior and inevitably damned. Then there is the whole burning witches thing—which incidentally was a very minor expression of Puritan extremism limited to the backwater town of Salem far from the centers of Puritan government.
Sonnet XIX is a radical assertion of a distinctly Puritan kind of joy. The poet begins mired in despair, haunted by his anxiety that he has in every way failed to do justice to the talent with which the Creator God endowed him. He is restless in his anxiety, arguing essentially to himself that any way he looks at his life he has not lived up to God’s expectations, that God will inevitably be disappointed by his works, and that as a result perdition is his inevitable and earned sentence.
It is a particularly Puritan experience that only in this deep disappointment, only in this despair, does the poet tap into authentic joy. It is only in the wisdom of accepting the limits of his worldly efforts that he glimpses the truth of the Puritan experience. Efforts played out in this sad and sorry world cannot impact one way or another a God who has known all and seen all since the beginnings of time. Joy comes from seeing, even feeling, the limitless power of God that renders humanity’s efforts not entirely irrelevant—God can still be offended by our transgressions—but minor, exercised within the context of God’s holy power. Take joy in your work, of course, take pride in your work, take some measure of satisfaction in the day to day, love your family and your friends as expressions of God’s love, certainly, but never assume those exertions, those experiences, can sway God. Thus, in the closing lines the poet’s conscience, perhaps his soul, calms the anxiety of the poet and assures him that God in his glory cannot distract, shock, surprise, or even concern the omnipotent God. Be steadfast in your faith, not proud of your works, the poem assures, and know the radiant joy of God’s sustaining presence.
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By John Milton
