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.
Background
Historical Context
Sonnet XIX is a religious poem. Although the subject of Sonnet XIX is ostensibly Milton’s private and very personal struggle to understand the implications of his blindness (and the condition of his soul and his relationship with God as a result of that disability), the poem reflects Milton’s historical moment. In virtually every expression of his public life, Milton reflected his historical moment, the rise of the radical Puritan insurgency that first challenged the sense of unearned privilege and moral complacency of the Church of England and then under the crafty leadership of Oliver Cromwell did what had not been done in England for more than four centuries: depose a king. In the wake of the civil war that put a kind of people’s government in place—the so-called Protectorate under Cromwell—an entire nation was compelled to examine the implications of religion and more specifically how far the English Anglican Church and its hierarchy had betrayed the fundamental principles of simplicity, humility, and radical and joyous enslavement to God first, the Church second.
The poem reflects this very schism. Indeed, the poet himself is divided between what he understands is the suasive call of his profession, assorted accolades and the achievements, his unearned sense of privilege from that sense of impact and input, and his fears that now, given his blindness, those days are gone and God will no longer be pleased with him. The sheer arrogance of that assertion, revealed by the intervention of patience, reflects Milton’s perception of the Anglican Church itself, steeped in its own sense of purpose and ignoring (or indifferent to) the majesty and power of the God that alone sustains the Church itself. If the argument in the sestet requires footnotes for a contemporary audience to understand Puritan theology, it did not in Milton’s time. The point he makes is clear: Resist all things earthly and never lose sight of the sacred.
Literary Context
Defining a literary context for a poet with the commanding stature of John Milton is difficult. After all, save for Shakespeare’s canon of plays and poems, the works of Milton have generated the greatest volume of published exegeses of any writer in the history of British literature. Milton is a towering figure, a sui generis, in that he developed a genre of writing—ambitious in scope, intellectual in its drive, finely crafted, and always theological in perspective—that became, well, an adjective: Miltonic. Save for his own vast reading into the literatures of Antiquity (always in the original, Milton learned multiple languages) and his thorough study of the King James Bible, there is little literary context to account for Milton, except Milton himself.
In this, Sonnet XIX might appear to be the exception, a very un-Miltonic poem. Scaled small, introspective, even emotional, the sonnet appears to define Milton’s literary context by rejecting it. However, Sonnet XIX is quintessentially Miltonic: the scale is hardly small, Milton tackles nothing less than the place of a fallen and egoistic sinner/doubter in a cosmos not just defined by an omnipotent God but sustained only through His agency. Although drawing on his own experience of a physical disability, blindness becomes a Miltonic device for intellectualizing panic, calming emotional excess through the calm application of a kind of tight legal logic: If God is greater than His creations, He cannot be altered, impacted, distracted, fooled, enticed, or impressed by any actions His creations affect. It is the legalistic logic that will later fault Lucifer, the character who otherwise drives Paradise Lost. Much as Lucifer is by far the most fetching character in an epic that blames Lucifer for the world’s moral chaos, here the first eight lines, with their pathos and touching panic, appear for more human, far more accessible than the tidy logic of the closing sestet. In that debate/resolution format, Sonnet XIX thus defines, rather than defies, the only literary context that helps position Milton: Milton himself.
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By John Milton
