When I Consider How My Light is Spent

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.