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Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent Summary & Analysis
by John Milton

Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent Summary & Analysis
by John Milton

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)”

1When I consider how my light is spent,

2   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

3   And that one Talent which is death to hide

4   Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent

5To serve therewith my Maker, and present

6   My true account, lest he returning chide;

7   “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

8   I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent

9That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

10   Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

11   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

12Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

13   And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

14   They also serve who only stand and wait.”

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Introduction

    • “Sonnet 19,” more commonly called "When I consider how my light is spent," is a poem by the English poet John Milton. Likely written in the mid-1650s, after Milton lost his eye-sight, the poem reflects on the physical and spiritual challenges the speaker faces as a blind person. He feels unable to complete the tasks that God has set for him, and worries that he is squandering his capacity to serve God. 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. Like some of Milton’s other poems (for example, “How Soon Hath Time”), the poem thus defends a Protestant position: the idea that salvation comes from faith, rather than work.

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Summary

    • 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.”

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Themes

    • Theme Faith and Work

      Faith and Work

      In “When I consider how my light is spent,” Milton reflects on blindness. This was an important topic for him, since he lost his own sight in the mid-1650s. Milton was a writer and translator—someone who relied on his eyes. Yet though blindness would have presented a number of practical problems, in this poem Milton focuses on the spiritual issues associated with blindness: the poem's speaker believes that he or she should use his or her talents as a writer to serve God, yet the speaker's blindness makes this impossible. This implicitly calls into question the demands that God places on human beings, yet any tension is resolved by the end of the sonnet: the speaker ultimately asserts that people best serve God through faith, rather than work.

      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 speaker argues that if God gives someone a skill or ability, then God expects that they will use it profitably: if they fail to do so, they will incur God’s wrath. But the speaker's blindness makes it impossible to continue with any literary work—even though the speaker had been undertaking that work specifically to glorify God. Seething under the poem’s first eight lines, then, is a sense of deep frustration, a sense that God may be unfair.

      For a devout Puritan like Milton, this is a potentially blasphemous position for several reasons. The speaker is in danger of thinking that he or she knows better than God—an all-knowing being. And the speaker imagines that the way to please God is through work—a position associated with Catholicism. It's important to note that Milton himself despised Catholicism and regularly attacked it throughout his career. As the speaker articulates frustration with God, the speaker strays into what the poem will ultimately deem a serious error—something the rest of the poem will be dedicated to correcting.

      After the speaker articulates these frustrations with being blind—and lapses into a dangerous, almost blasphemous argument with God—a new voice enters the poem, which the speaker calls “patience.” This allegorical figure makes two arguments. First, this figure notes that God doesn't require human work or human gifts. Instead, the best way to secure salvation is simply to obey God. The voice suggests that this obedience is “mild” and, perhaps more importantly, flexible. It means different things for different people: while some “speed … o’er Land and Ocean,” others “stand and wait.” Yet both are, or can be, forms of service.

      Performing great works is thus perfectly acceptable to Milton’s God, but it's not the only way to please him. It is just as effective to simply wait for God's commands, perhaps forever. The action doesn’t matter. What matters the way that it is performed—and whether it is an expression of faith in God and God's will.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)”

    • Lines 1-2

      When I consider how my light is spent,
         Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

      The first two lines of “When I consider how my light is spent” establish the poem’s broad concern and its form. The speaker begins by complaining about losing “light,” or going blind. 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.

      Also like most sonnets in English, “When I consider...” is written in iambic pentameter: a meter the speaker handles easily and smoothly here, 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.

      On the surface, then, “When I consider...” begins as a properly executed Petrarchan sonnet: nothing is obviously strange or amiss. Its formal disturbances are buried a bit, under the surface of the poem. For instance, 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.

      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.

    • Lines 3-6

      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;

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    • Lines 7-8

      “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
         I fondly ask.

    • Lines 8-11

      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.

    • Lines 11-14

      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.”

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Symbols

    • Symbol Light

      Light

      When the speaker notes that his or her “light is spent” in the poem’s first line, this means literally that the speaker has lost his or her eyesight. (Hence the poem’s alternate title, “On His Blindness”). That literal meaning is probably the key one for the poem. But there is a secondary, symbolic meaning. In the Bible, God is often closely associated with light. Light is the first thing he makes when he creates the world, for example. Pious and faithful Christians are thus often said to “walk with the light” or to “have seen the light,” while people who live in sin or who have not been converted to Christianity are said to be in “darkness.” The loss of light is thus not simply the loss of sight: it also stands, symbolically, for the loss of faith or intimacy with God. The literal and symbolic meanings attached to "light" are thus connected to each other: because the speaker has lost sight, the speaker fears that he or she has lost "light" itself, that is, a connection to God.

    • Symbol Dark

      Dark

      "Darkness" is the opposite of light. When the speaker mentions it in line 2, the speaker is thinking of the challenges he or she faces as a blind person: the world has literally become dark for the speaker, turning even the most familiar places and activities into dangerous challenges. In a world built for people who can see, the speaker must now somehow find a way to survive. But, like "light" in the previous line, the word also has a symbolic sense. It symbolizes sin and the absence of God—who is often closely associated with light in the Christian tradition. When the speaker invokes darkness in line 2, the speaker is thus expressing anxiety about his or her physical and spiritual safety. The world, for this speaker, is a dreary, sinful place: a place of temptation and challenge, which the speaker must carefully negotiate in order to make it to Heaven. The speaker's blindness has made it all the more difficult to do so.

    • Symbol Yoke

      Yoke

      A yoke is a harness, used by farmers to attach oxen to carts and plows: once an ox is in a yoke, it pulls the cart or plow behind it as it walks forward. The yoke thus often serves as a symbol for bondage or imposition: someone powerful imposing his or her will on a less powerful person, forcing them to perform certain tasks or obey their commands. However, Milton uses the word in a more positive sense here: for the speaker of this poem, it is not an imposition or a burden to follow God’s commands. Though God may be the master, and the speaker his ox, it is no trouble to do what God asks. The speaker thus transforms a symbol for the unjust exercise of power into just its opposite: here it describes a satisfying, “mild” relationship between servant and master.

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      Though "When I consider how my life is spent" begins with religious doubt, it ends up expressing with considerable confidence Puritan religious doctrine. The Puritans not only had strong feelings about questions like the relationship between faith and works; they also had strict standards for the way churches should look. They preferred a bare, plain space for their worship. During the English Civil War, they destroyed much of the stained glass and icons that survived from the middle ages. In other words, their position was as much aesthetic as religious. As a devout Puritan and a poet, Milton is thus in a tricky position. His art relies on ornamental literary devices, yet those same devices may seem overly ornamental, out-of-keeping with the plain aesthetic he favored in religious matters.

      In keeping with this, the poem's use of alliteration is fairly sparse: the speaker is not interested in dressing up his or her anxieties. Instead, the speaker presents them plainly, directly. However, there are important moments of alliteration—for instance the repeated /d/ and /w/ sounds in line 2 with “days, in this dark world and wide,” or the /p/ sound in line 8 with “patience, to prevent.”

      In these cases, the alliteration links together two otherwise discrete ideas: patience, for instance, becomes associated with prevention. Because of the alliteration, it feels like the speaker is suggesting that prevention is patience’s job, part of its identity. Similarly, the width of the world—its overwhelming size—becomes, thanks to the alliteration, closely linked to the world itself. For this newly blind speaker, the world is defined by its enormity, its huge expanse. Thus although though the speaker does not use alliteration heavily, the use of alliteration the poem does underline its argument and suggests connections between concepts that might otherwise seem distant from each other.

    • Assonance

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    • Consonance

    • Enjambment

    • End-Stopped Line

    • Caesura

    • Allusion

    • Personification

    • Apostrophe

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Light
    • Ere
    • Lodged
    • Bent
    • Chide
    • Day-labour
    • Murmur
    • Yoke
    • Post
    • O'er
    Light

    • Vision, eyesight. Here the speaker is referring to the capacity to perceive light: in other words, the speaker can't see.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)”

    • Form

      “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—though, unlike most Petrarchan sonnets, the conflicts here arise from religious faith rather than erotic love.

      The Petrarchan sonnet is so well suited to doubt, argument, and conflict, because of its formal structure. A Petrarchan sonnet is always fourteen lines long; it is divided into two parts: the octave (the first 8 lines) and the sestet (the final six). Though each section shares the same meter, they have different rhyme schemes. Poets often propose an idea or explore a position in the first eight lines of the poem, and then in the final six lines, they turn around and critique that idea. The formal division of the poem lends itself to a conceptual division, a split in the speaker’s ideas.

      Milton follows this form closely. In the first eight lines of his poem, his speaker advances a potentially blasphemous anxiety: that the speaker will not be able to satisfy God’s desire for great works because the speaker can't see. In the final six lines, the speaker corrects this idea by invoking a core tenant of the Protestant faith: God does not need human works and awards salvation on the basis of faith alone.

      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.

    • Meter

      Like most English sonnets, “When I consider how my life is spent” is written in iambic pentameter. The meter is one of the most prestigious and dignified in English: Shakespeare used it for tragedies like Hamlet; Milton will use it later in his career for his epic, Paradise Lost. The use of the meter thus indicates how seriously the poet takes the subject matter of this poem: these are not trifling questions, and they deserve the highest and most serious treatment he can give them.

      However, the speaker’s handling of the meter is not uniform in its confidence and skill. At points in the poem, the speaker achieves smooth and precise meter. Unsurprisingly, this precision comes when the speaker is most certain and confident about the poem's religious position. For example, look at the poem’s final lines, which are perfectly iambic:

      And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
      They also serve who only stand and wait.”

      As clear and certain as the meter is here, the speaker struggles to maintain a strong iambic rhythm earlier in the poem. This happens as the speaker struggles to reconcile blindness with the speaker's obligations as a Christian. The poem is peppered substitutions, particularly in the first and third foot. For example, line 7 contains an awkward mid-line spondee (stressed-stressed):

      “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

      Notably, this is a question that even the speaker thinks is "fond"—foolish or crazy. The meter reflects this internal conflict: the speaker cannot pose the question in a smooth, confident way, and instead slips into a rough, ambiguous meter. The caesura that splits the fourth foot, "our, light," is also unusual and awkward. The speaker’s meter thus reflects the speaker's confidence and certainty as the speaker wrestles with important religious questions. The smoother the meter, the more certain the speaker is about the best way to serve God.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      “When I consider how my life is spent” is a Petrarchan sonnet and it follows a standard Petrarchan rhyme scheme. This scheme can be divided into two parts. In the first eight lines of the poem, the speaker uses only two rhyme sounds: /-ent/ and /-ide/. This gives these lines a churning feel, as they circle obsessively around these two sounds. In this way, they mimic the anxiety they describe: the speaker's fear of no longer satisfying God's expectations because the speaker has gone blind. Like anxiety, these lines fail to progress, to discover something new; instead, they always return to themselves. The final six lines of the poem thus come almost as a relief, introducing three new rhyme sounds in six lines: /-eed/, /-est/, and /-ate/. The full rhyme scheme for the poem is thus:

      ABBAABBACDECDE

      This is a standard rhyme scheme for a Petrarchan sonnet. The new rhymes that appear in the final lines of the poem mimic the expanded sense of possibility and the freedom from anxiety that the speaker describes in these lines: the sound of the poem gives the reader a taste of the freedom that characterizes Christian faith for Milton.

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Speaker

    • The poem provides, at best, sparing information about its speaker. The reader learns that the speaker is a devout Protestant and has recently gone blind. The speaker has a great “Talent” and hoped to accomplish some magnificent work, but now can't. Besides these basic facts, there is not much information about the speaker’s life. The poem does not tell its readers the speaker’s profession, gender, political views, social status, level of education, etc. (The poem's subtitle, "On his blindness," suggests that the speaker is a man—though the subtitle was probably added after Milton wrote the poem).

      However, most scholars assume that “When I consider how my life is spent” is an autobiographical poem because it so closely aligns with the facts of the poet John Milton’s life. It was written in the mid-1650s, after Milton lost his eyesight, and it recounts the spiritual doubts and anxieties that his blindness occasioned. For this reason, most readers assume that the speaker of the poem is Milton himself, writing at a particularly sensitive moment in his life: just beginning to work on his epic poem Paradise Lost while also serving as the Latin Secretary for Oliver Cromwell’s government, responsible for defending that government in Europe.

      If this is true, it sheds some light on some of the poem’s more ambiguous moments. For instance, the “one Talent which is death to hide” is most likely Milton’s gift as a poet or a scholar. The work he wants to complete, his "true account," is likely Paradise Lost—or, perhaps, his political work defending Cromwell’s government. The poem is thus intimately entangled not only with grand questions of faith, but with the circumstances of Milton’s life.

  • “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)” Setting

    • “When I consider how my life is spent” does not establish a specific setting. Indeed, much of the poem seems to take place within the speaker’s mind, as the speaker considers questions of Christian faith. In the poem's final lines, the speaker adopts a global perspective, soaring above the earth to observe people crossing land and sea in service to God. In this moment, the speaker seems to observe the whole world at once. The speaker is freed from a particular position in space, from having a particular viewpoint; here, the speaker is capable of transcending all that to see the world as God himself does.

      However, based on the poem’s language, its literary form, its date of composition, and the particular religious debates it engages, it seems reasonable to assume that the broad setting of the poem is England in the 17th century, a time when religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics were matters of life and death (and indeed, Catholicism was illegal in England). In the years immediately before the poem was written, England fought a bloody civil war over the issues of religious doctrine that the poem takes up. Though the speaker is capable of shedding a specific, personal viewpoint and adopting a kind of God’s-eye view of the world, the speaker cannot shed the cultural and political circumstances that surround the poem's writing: the speaker remains bound to a specific moment of religious conflict.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)”

      Literary Context

      “When I consider how my life is spent” is a Petrarchan sonnet, a form that developed in Italy during the Middle Ages. Originally a kind of popular song, the Italian poets Petrarch and Dante made it into an elevated, prestigious kind of formal verse in the 13th and 14th centuries, writing long sonnet sequences about their unrequited loves for beautiful, distant women. As the sonnet spread through Europe in the following centuries, it continued to be used for similar purposes. Most sonnets were written by men, about women; most described those women as beautiful, inaccessible, and cruel.

      Despite the sonnet’s traditional focus on love, its form is relatively flexible, suitable for a wide range of topics. Its structure, neatly divided into two halves, makes it particularly good for poetic arguments: the speaker can propose a position or idea in the first eight lines and then dispute in the final six. For these reasons, the subject matter of the sonnet gradually broadened. By the end of the 16th century, for instance, poets like John Donne were regularly using the sonnet to stage religious disputes. (Though these poems often contain erotic undertones, a kind of ghostly inheritance from the history of the form).

      Puritan poets like George Herbert and, later, Milton, were especially interested in taking the form and reinventing it, separating it from the erotic—which they considered sinful. “When I consider how my life is spent” is thus a key document in the evolution of the sonnet: beginning as a popular song, transforming into a prestigious love poem, before becoming, finally, an elegant container for religious and philosophic disputes.

      Historical Context

      The poem was written in the 1650s, after the end of the English Civil War. The King, Charles I, had been deposed and executed. In his place, a democratic government led by Oliver Cromwell governed England. The English Civil War was prompted in part by religious disagreements: Cromwell’s government was much more sympathetic to the Puritans than the King’s government had been. For a devout Puritan intellectual like Milton, Cromwell’s revolution thus represented a magnificent opportunity to create a country that aligned with his religious beliefs.

      Milton threw himself whole-heartedly into this project, writing pamphlets and tracts defending the revolution and Cromwell. He eventually became Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, an important position, since Latin was the language of education and learning around Europe. Milton was tasked with defending Cromwell to the most important intellectual figures on the European continent. He was a passionate and powerful writer who made vital contributions to the cause.

      However, Milton lost his eyesight in the mid-1650s, at the height of his political involvement (an event that his enemies interpreted as a punishment from God). He was forced to retire from public life and his daughters were largely tasked with his care. However, his blindness did not stifle his literary production and creativity. In the years after he went blind, Milton produced some of the most important poetry in the English language, including Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. His daughters would read aloud to him and transcribe his poems for him.

      After the restoration of the monarchy at the end of the 1650s, Milton narrowly escaped execution for his political work in support of the Cromwell government—only the intervention of fellow poet and member of Parliament, Andrew Marvell, saved his life and allowed him to complete his great works.

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