Speaking about two poems by John
Milton
by Francisco Vaz Brasil
On His
Blindness
and
On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-three
To
introduce this essay I will draw a short biography about the author. John
Milton was born in 1608 to a Puritan family (December 09, 1608 – November 08, 1674) . Was a
representant of English classicism and author of famous book Paradise Lostdo
one of most important epic poems of universal literature He was politics,
playwright and schoolar of religion. Supported Oliver Cromwell during the
Republican English. But was arrested and was blind due to glaucoma. In prison,
said his masterpiece, "Paradise Lost," which tells the story of the
fall of Lucifer, and was published in 1667. Four years later, the book launches
Paradise regained, a sequence of the first poem, deals with the coming of
Christ to Earth regain that Adam would have lost.
In
June 1642, with 33 years, Milton maaried Mary Powell, 16 years of age. In 1646,
his family and was expelled from Oxford for supporting Carlos I during the
English Civil War, changes, in conjunction with the couple. They had four
children: Anne, Mary, John and Deborah. His wife Mary died on May 5 of 1652, of
complications of childbirth, after delivery of Deborah to May 2, which deeply
affected Milton, as is evident in his 23rd sonnet. In June, John died at 15
months, their sisters survive until adulthood. The November 12 of 1656, Milton
married Katherine Woodcock. She died in February 3, 1658, less than four months
of giving birth to her daughter Katherine, who also died at 17 March. On 24
February 1663, Milton married Elizabeth Minshull, who cared for him until the
his death.
Main Milton’s works are: L'Allegro (1631), Il Penseroso (1633), Comus (a masque)(1634), Lycidas
(1638), Areopagitica (1644), Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671) and Samson Agonistes (1671).
Milton
is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic
poem in English. Together with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,
it confirms Milton’s reputation as one of the greatest English poets. In his
prose works Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the
execution of King Charles I. From the beginning of the English Civil Wars in 1642 to long after the
restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he espoused in all his works a political philosophy that
opposed tyranny and state-sanctioned religion. His influence extended not only
through the civil wars and interregnum but also to the American and French
revolutions. In his works on theology, he valued liberty of conscience, the
paramount importance of Scripture as a guide in matters of faith, and religious
toleration toward dissidents. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of
the English Commonwealth after 1649 through his handling of its international
correspondence and his defense of the government against polemical attacks from
abroad.
Some authors have written about the blindness of John Milton and have a
dangerous indication of the cause of the problem has changed the life of this
great English epic poet. But the main cause pointed is glaucoma due to acute
emotional crises
The most
valuable source of information about the reactions of John Milton to his loss
of vision is a letter he wrote to his friend Leonard Phileas. Among the many
angles covered by the blind writer, to bring the fine phrases in showing how to
accept blindness.
He
says: ... "my darkness, for natural mercy of God, with the help of
studies, leisure and kind of conversation my friends, is much less oppressive
than the deadly darkness to which it refers. Because if, as is written, the man
does not live by bread alone, but of every word that comes from the mouth of
God, that a man can not really accept this, thinking it can only obtain the
light of their own eyes, judging - However, sufficiently illuminated by the
guidance and providence of God? Therefore, since it provides the things and
gives me coverage, as it does, and leads me forward and three for His hand, as
though the whole life, I can not give a break to my eyes, since this seems His
be happy? "
Indeed, during the 22 years of his blindness, Milton
has become much more busy and your activity at work grew as never before
occurred. The first eight years of his life as devoted to blind him to
Cromwell, as Secretary for Foreign Languages. Letters translated from Latin
into English and vice versa. Milton worked with the help of secretaries..
Organized a
dictionary of Latin, prepared a story for publication in England and came to
publish a very serious study on the Christian doctrine. Also, always maintained
extensive correspondence, as was customary. It is vital that we remember that
the fine statements of faith written by Milton have been compounded by a man
who was blind at the height of its potential and that he felt in the hands of
God. John Milton was married three
times. His third wife was a very beautiful wife, but own a very difficult and
violent temper. They say that when the Lord Buckingham visited, he was fired
saying that he considered he was married to a real rose. Milton replied:
"I can not judge by color, lord, but feel it by thorns."
Politically, Milton was very controversial, even being arrested for being
a staunch supporter of the Commonwealth. Although some of his works were burnt
publicly, was spared the punishment but not greater rid of the dismissal of his
property, leaving a situation in some poverty.
It is at this stage that follows writes that the work would be his
masterpiece - Paradise Lost - which speaks of the fall into the temptation and
expulsion from Paradise, a language that aims to rival the Greek epic. The
poems were dictated to his daughters and the manuscript sold for five pounds.
Now,
let’s do to an explaination of thoughts and ideas about John Milton’s poem – On His Blindness. Firstly, this problem
brought him a verbal enrichment even greater.
During his service to the Commonwealth, in
1652, Milton became blind and it became necessary for others to share in his
labors. His blindness occasioned one of the most moving of his
sonnets, On his blindness, written in 1655. It records
his fear that he will never be able to use his God-given gift for poetry again.
Yet God may demand an accounting of his righteousness. And his entry into
Heaven will depend upon how well he has used the gifts that God gave him. The
sonnet ends with Milton s acceptance of the fact that what God wants of him is
obedience and resignation. He can then serve God even if he cannot write
poetry, for they also serve who only stand and wait…
This means the embodiment of Patience.
In
reference to structure of the poem, we perceive the beauty of form on the
sonnet. Once we have assimilated the impact of what the poem
says, our attention begins to focus on how the poem is put together. There is
an abundance of artistry and technique here. For one thing, the poem is an
Italian sonnet. This means that it is a 14-line poem with regular meter and an
intricate rhyme scheme – abba abba in the first eight lines, followed by
three new rhyming sounds in the last six lines (cde cde).
When we read we perceive that this is an
expression of a recognizable human experience. As we absorb the poem, we listen
to the voice of suffering humanity. For all its particularity, the poem arouses
our awareness of something that is close to the experience of everyone - the
tragedy of human life, the debilitating catastrophe that changes a person's
whole life, the psychic pain that cannot be brushed aside because it is a daily
reality. The poem does what art often does: it faces the facts of life at their
worst. One function of art, therefore, is to allow is to grapple with our own
problems from a safe distance.
The perspective from which we view human
suffering is a Christian one. Milton here contemplates his handicap under the
aspect of God’s providence. Even the anguish of the first eight lines is
defined in Christian terms as the speaker fears God’s condemnation of him for
his inactivity now that he is blind. Having wrestled with the problem, the
speaker’s quest for satisfaction is also achieved in Christian terms: “they
also serve who only stand and wait.” That is, the speaker can stand justified
before his God because of such avenues of service as submission, worship, and
expectation of what God will yet send. The poem thus gives is a new slant on
the timeless truth that all things work together for good to those who love
God, and a new example of Paul’s insight about learning to be content in any
circumstance of life.
Milton does not say all this abstractly.
He embodies his meanings in poetic form, which means that he speaks in images,
metaphors, and allusions. The method of art is to incarnate meaning in concrete
form. The artist shows, and is never content only to tell in the
form of propositions. The strategy of art is to enact rather than summarize. In
this poem, Milton embodies his message in the concrete form of a person
meditating on a problem and searching for a solution. The result is that as
readers we recreate in our imaginations the experience of the speaker in the
poem, from the moment he embarks on his process of meditation (“When I
consider…”) to the final resolution in the famous aphorism with which the poem ends.
The poem does not only ask us to grasp an idea with our minds; it also puts us
through an experience.
In achieving this experiential
concreteness and immediacy, the poem works by a certain indirectness. Because
of this indirection, art always puts a burden of interpretation in its
audience. In the present instance, we have to know how to interpret figurative
language. The vocabulary of the poem makes little sense unless we are familiar
with three gospel statements by Jesus – the incident of the blind man whom
Jesus healed (John 9:1-4), the parables of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew
20:1-16), and the talents (Matthew 25:14-30). As in those biblical passages,
the images of the poem are heavily metaphoric.
In other hand looking at Milton's poem On His Having Arrived At the Age of
Twenty-Three, we can perceive. In John Milton' s works we can see the
problems of the English society and his own too. Such a poem is " On His
Having Arrived At the Age of Twenty-Three" because it shows the concerns
that Milton had about his career when he was young and still hadn't chosen his
own way in life. In this famous work of his we don't see a celebration of a
birthday but a problem that the young gentleman faces as time passes by. The
author uses many metaphors and symbols in order to give a more vivid image of
his problem, and at the end he gives a solution to this problem.
In this poem we can see the
personification of Time, as a thief of youth of the author, robbing their wings
on 23 years of age. The time is inexorable, change the appearance and does
change the spring and sprouting seeds and the emergence of the flowers ...
This
poem is, too, a sonnet, with rhyms and it is in addition to spirituality, is
rich in imagination by images and metaphors that it spread.
And then, for conclude in Milton, it’s not
so easy discovery under a lot of words and archaic phrases the bright stones of
wisdom. Milton asks how the Lord of the universe could allow this happen.
Everything that Milton wanted was to use his talents and serve God. How could
God require your services denying the light he needed to work?
But
the Patience in order to prevent the murmur, said "God does not need the
work of men and not of their personal talents, those that best support your
yoke soft or that best serve to Him.
Recently
there was in London the Ninth International Milton Symposium which also marks
John Milton’s quatercentenary. (He was born December 9, 1608, and died in
1674.) In a sense it’s just a big birthday party for a big birthday, although
none of us is likely be honored by a party at which some 200 people from all
around the world give papers celebrating our achievements, either during our
lifetimes or after we have been dead for centuries.
Some writers that attended the symposium
manifested their reasons in participation on this event. They have been going
around asking, and the answers have come quickly and spontaneously. Nigel Smith
of Princeton, whose published work is more historical than literary, set the tone
said, “It’s the beauty of the thing; the poetry is just gorgeous; it makes me
want to cry.” John Leonard of the University of Western Ontario seconded him:
“It’s the way he works with words; what keeps me coming back is the sheer sound
of the poetry, ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate.’
But it’s more than that, as both Leonard and
Smith agreed. Leonard: “More than anyone else, Milton captures the disjunction
between the way things are and the way they should be.” Smith: “It’s the
combination of amazing poetry and an insistence on principle.” Rather than
being employed for its own sake, the poetry is always in the service of ideas
and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure
themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes – judgments about the
nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about
the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action,
about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about
one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about
the primacy of faith, about everything.
Milton’s poetry never lets you relax . Even
when one of the famous similes wanders down what appears to be a desultory path
of mythical allusions and idealized landscapes, it always returns you in the
end to the moral perspective that had only apparently been suspended.
Reading a poetry full of moments like this,
moments when a poetic effect cannot be separated from the pressure of
ideological choice, is at once exhausting and exhilarating. Milton’s poetry is
good to think with. It’s a good workout. You feel really great and fit when
you’ve finished.
Sources:
http://rhesponse.blogspot.com/2005/11/miltons-sonnet-on-his-blindness-part-4.html
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/happy-birthday-milton/?emc=eta1
http://sinaisdarevolucao.blogspot.com/2006/06/john-milton.html
