When I Consider How My Light is Spent

John Milton

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1673

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

Milton draws on the Renaissance sonnet form most associated with the Italian poet and theological scholar Petrarch (1304-1374), whose prolific canon of hundreds of sonnets came to define the form as a kind of debate in which the opening eight lines, termed the octave, posed a problem or an emotional dilemma and the closing six lines offered a solution. For Petrarch, a hopeless romantic compelled by the complicated urgencies of the heart, most often the sonnet was used to investigate the emotional tragedy of unrequited love; that is, the poet struggling to understand limitations and to adjust to disappointment. The Petrarchan sonnet then measures the distance between what we want and what we must accept.

Although not inclined to explore the complex relations of the unrequired heart, Milton follows a similar formal structure. The octave here exposes the poet’s anxiety, his fear over how richly and obviously he has disappointed God. Whether an examination of his obligations as a poet now compromised by his failing vision or more broadly an examination of how paltry and thin is the expression of whatever talent God gave him, the argument in the octave is one of discontent and troubling uncertainty. And the closing six lines, when patience reassures the poet, offers the broadest kind of hope and joy: God expects nothing save steadfast faith and joyous humility. The turn from problem to resolution, from anxiety to serenity, from despair to joy, is signaled by the single word “but” in middle of Line 8. Termed the “volta” (Italian for “turn”), the word signals that the sonnet is ready now to offer a way out, or at least a way to endure without despair. What is singular about Milton’s use of the Petrarchan sonnet is his placement of the volta in the middle of the line, still within the octave. Traditionally the volta would commence Line 9, signaling the turn away from the quagmire of the emotional anxiety. To place the volta within a line, however, suggests Milton’s urgency, his own recognition that the dilemma of the speaker is self-imposed and needs to be adjusted quickly, that the speaker is enduring anxiety unnecessarily and needs the reassurance that the sestet will offer sooner rather than later.

Meter

The meter of the poem is, again, traditional: each line defined by iambic pentameter (every other syllable is stressed in a line that has five units, or feet, of stressed and unstressed syllables). The regularly recurring meter works to create a sense of calm and stability against the hot rush of anxieties and doubts the speaker expresses. Imagine how chaotic and confusing the world of the speaker is, when the poem disciplines that anxiety into tightly contained and controlled percussive meter.

That sense of stability is further enhanced by the sonnet’s rhyme scheme, which sustains the poem’s meter. Following the traditional metrics of the Petrarchan sonnet, the rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDE CDE. The rhymes are anything but subtle and clever: They are direct and clear and bold and obvious to the ear. There are no sight rhymes or clever slant rhymes. They are stunningly immediate: chide/denied; need/speed; state/wait. They are clarion in their recurring sound pattern. “Spent” rhymes with “bent,” period. What could be more regular, more happily predictable and anticipated? The rhythm and the rhyme patterns of the poem reassure the reader that the anxieties of the speaker are themselves set against the overwhelming evidence of a cosmos that renders such anxieties as trivial. The meter will not permit chaos, the meter will not collapse into doubt, the meter will not sustain confusion. In this the sonnet works, metrically, like any prayer or Old Testament psalm: The very regularity of the form stabilizes the emotional urgencies of the central character.

Voice

Voice is tricky in this sonnet. It is tempting, nearly irresistible, to make the voice simply autobiographical, to assign Milton himself as the voice that speaks the sonnet. After all, if it is indeed about losing vision, then Milton, who lost his eyesight in his forties, is a logical choice. The voice, however, can be broadened to include any troubled sinner in the hands of a powerful and omnipotent God who fears their earth-bound efforts, as sincere and accomplished as they might be, may still not be sufficiently impressive to coax God to sympathize. What happens, the voice asks, if God is not magnified by my labor?

Ultimately, however, that voice splits: the opening eight lines delivered by that anxious and troubled speaker, uncertain over how to define his identity, his problematic place within a Christian cosmos; the closing six lines delivered by a kind of internal oracle, a welcome expression of the Christian speaker’s identity that too often he has chosen to ignore. That voice, actually given quotation marks in the poem to indicate the integrity of the presence, is identified as “patience,” and tells the troubled sinner that his doubts are significant, certainly, but hardly the last word of his Christian journey. In this the voice undergoes a tectonic change in tone, from panic to serenity, from doubt to insight, from terror to peace. Sympathize with the poet but learn from patience.