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.”
(https://koshyav.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-brief-history-of-sonnet-chapter-7.html)
The rhyme scheme is abba abba and the sestet cde cde.
The metre is iambic pentameter.
But what does Milton bring that heightens Shakespeare, if at all. The two sonnets
I deal with today have in them what Longinus called sublimity, one in its clear
understanding of love, and the other of long-suffering, endurance, persistence,
perseverance, patience, steadfastness - all not only Christian but also stoic virtues,
raise their art to a level that leaves me, though having read all the great writers of
critics of today, a bit perplexed as these two move me more. Am I old fashioned,
hopelessly out of sync with my time and a black skin, wearing a white mask.
I don't know and basically don't care.
Poetry moves me on its own and these sonnets matter to me simply by moving me
deeply and enlightening me on love and on what it means to be yoked with the
divine, whatever others think of it or not.
Milton has written a more political sonnet on the massacre at Piedmont which I give
here but while it may have its own political value and cannot be dismissed for its
pleasing righteous anger, is nowhere near the one on his blindness. The sonnet is particularly
accentuated if you have read Samuel Johnson's Life of Milton that speaks of how he
has very keen eyesight in college that made him an excellent fencer and that his eyes shone
brightly as a young man but he had to dictate Paradise Lost, his greatest work to his
daughter who had to laboriously take it down, showing both his dependence and great powers
of composition as well as memory.
We finally connect with the human element, or I do, in literature, over and above all
others. Another critic may prefer the sonnet on the massacre but my taste remains old
fashioned.
On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
(Taken from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Late_Massacre_in_Piedmont)
Here too the line that touches us most is the one on how the Protestant mothers and infants
were killed for their husbands' new beliefs that went counter to the Catholic ones, not
the other issues that Milton raises that seem of no relevance to us today in 2020,
though people still kill mothers and children over religious and casteist and sectarian
differences as well as political ones. We do not feel it as much as his personal plaint
on his blindness with its reference to Jesus's parable of the one talent lodged
useless with him!
Is there any difference between the Miltonic sonnet and the Shakespearean one? Only in the
rhyme he uses in his sestet. While Shakespeare uses the cd cd ee pattern, Milton goes for in
"On his blindness" a cde cde one, and in the Piedmont sonnet a cd cd cd one.
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