[On His Blindness] Sonnet 16 (Historical Context)

Historical Context

At the end of the 1630s, England was in turmoil. Radical Puritan sects were demanding a complete reform of the Church of England. There was growing tension between the House of Commons, one of the branches of England’s parliament, and King Charles I over the financing of his wars. Adding to the conflict was that the House of Commons was largely Puritan while Charles, as England’s King, was head of the Church of England. Charles’s attempt to arrest five leaders of Commons in 1642 was the spark that set off the civil war. After years of indecisive battles, Oliver Cromwell’s brilliant military leadership — combined with Parliament’s control of most of England’s financial resources — finally prevailed. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded. His son, Charles II, led a Scottish army in an attempt to win back the throne, but was routed by Cromwell and the English. After nine long years, the civil wars were ended and England was a proclaimed a Commonwealth.

Milton cut short a trip to the continent in 1639 when he heard of the religious controversies in England. Back at home, he became an active agitator in the movement that eventually brought down Charles I. He wrote numerous pamphlets and other works on behalf of the Puritan revolutionaries and later for Cromwell’s Commonwealth. He did not hesitate to attack the Church of England (in Of Reformation, for example), Parliament (in Areopagitica), or the King himself (in Eikonoklastes) to enunciate principles in which he believed. He was a fierce believer in individual freedoms. Some of his most famous pieces defended freedom of press and of religious conscience. His arguments advocating divorce created a minor controversy in the midst of the rush to civil war.

From his time as a student on, Milton’s great ambition was to write a magnificent epic poem for England. While in Europe in 1638, he began collecting possible subjects, both religious and secular, for this poem. But when he entered the political fray, he deliberately postponed his plan for poetry. In addition to his polemical writing, he was appointed Secretary of Foreign Tongues in 1649, a government post that took up much of his time. Between Lycidas in November 1637 and the full onset of his blindness in 1652, Milton had not written a single major poem, and he had done next to no work on the epic. Whenever “Sonnet 16” was written, Milton obviously regretted the time he had spent not making poetry. The thought that his blindness could form an insurmountable obstacle to the realization of his life’s work was linked to an acute awareness of the time he had lost, not to say wasted.

Milton’s Blindness

Milton’s blindness was not an unexpected bolt from the blue. His mother had bad vision, and his own eyesight faded slowly over nearly a decade. Trouble seemed to start in 1644, when he noticed problems reading. He once described his early symptoms as “a sort of rainbow” that obscured whatever he was looking at. That was followed by a mist in his left eye which gradually blotted out everything on that side. Objects nearby looked smaller than they should have. When he rested and closed his eyes, he experienced an explosion of colors. This description has suggested to medical specialists that he had a cyst on his pituitary gland. In 1650 his left eye became completely blind. Milton’s continuous writing, reading, and correction of proofs probably hastened his complete loss of vision. For the last twenty-two years of his life he had to dictate his writings to a secretary. A more difficult adjustment for the studious Milton may have been that he needed someone to read to him.

Milton became completely blind at the age of forty-three in 1652 and “Sonnet 16” is intimately connected with the poet’s loss of sight. But scholars disagree whether Milton composed the piece upon the onset of total blindness or at another date (the poem was not actually printed until the collection Poems in 1673). Some critics, for example, insist that the sonnets were written in chronological order. If so, “Sonnet 16” would have been written sometime after 1655. In that year inhabitants of the Italian area of Piedmont brutally massacred members of the Waldensians (also known as the-Vaudois), a group of religious dissenters who had been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. Milton’s next sonnet is from that year and commemorates “the late massacre at Piedmont.”

Others believe the despair evident in the poem could only have been so deeply felt soon after the full onset of his blindness. By 1654, when the author completed his Second Defence of the English People, he had regained full confidence in his ability to work despite his disability. After that work was completed, these critics contend, his blindness took on a completely different cast in his own mind: what had earlier seemed a handicap became proof that, like prophets of old, he had been marked by God for some extraordinary work. If he did postpone publishing the sonnet until later, it might have been to conceal his sightlessness from his political enemies, who would have used it as a sign of God’s wrath. This accusation that was often made anyway, especially after the restoration of the Charles II to the throne of England in 1660.

Still others speculate that the poem could have been written long before the author’s complete loss of vision. Milton did not seem handicapped by his blindness, even immediately after it became total. The Council of State retained him as Secretary of Foreign Tongues, a position which required him to compose and translate important diplomatic correspondence. They apparently did not view his blindness as a liability. Furthermore, Milton became progressively blind over a number of years and would have had an opportunity to adjust to it. These critics point to the line “Ere half my days in this dark world and wide” and note that Milton would have been long past the midpoint of his life in the 1650s. In the seventeenth century, a normal lifespan was considered “Threescore years and ten” (seventy years), a number mentioned in the Psalms. Milton turned thirty-six in 1644. He first noticed problems with his sight at that time, problems that often prevented him from reading. Perhaps then Milton wrote “Sonnet 16” — which was not titled “On His Blindness” until long after his death — in anticipation of his eventual blindness.

Compare & Contrast

• 17th Century: The English government employed censors who reviewed all books, journals, and pamphlets before they were published. Censors were concerned with preventing the expression of heretical beliefs, antireligious sentiments, or attacks on highly placed individuals, like the king. John Milton’s essay Areopagitica was an early plea for complete freedom of the press.

  Today: Because of the constitutional right to free speech, censorship initiatives in the United States almost always often come from private interest groups. The focus of such attempts to control speech is rarely political. It is sometimes religious, as in the effort to prevent the teaching of scientific theories of evolution in public schools. It is sometimes ethnic or sexual, as seen in efforts to prevent expression that is seen to be sexist, racist, or somehow derogatory to one group of citizens. Most often, it is directed at material with explicit sexual content that opponents believe could be detrimental to the morals of children or adults, or which could lead to antisocial behavior such as sex crimes.

• 17th Century: Marriage was considered a sacramental institution by the Roman Catholic Church as well as the churches in England. Despite Henry VIII’s divorces one hundred years earlier, divorces were very rarely granted in Milton’s time, and then only on grounds of adultery or impotence. His advocacy of it in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was considered a nearly heretical suggestion.

  Today: Divorce is easier to obtain than at practically any time in western history. According to the 1997 Statistical Abstract, more than one million Americans divorce every year. More than half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce.

• 17th Century: Europe was wracked by religious intolerance and members of groups whose beliefs differed from official religions were often persecuted for their beliefs. The Protestant Huguenots were forced to leave Catholic France, Protestant sects like the Puritans and Quakers, as well as Roman Catholics, were driven underground or forced to leave England. In Italy the Waldensian (Vaudois) sect was driven into the Alps and eventually murdered.

  Today: Religious persecution is often as bloody today as it was three hundred years ago. Christian Serbs have waged a war of extermination against Bosnian Muslims for most of the 1990s. The conflict between Hindus and Sikhs in India erupts regularly into violence. And although a settlement has been sought for nearly twenty years, the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis usually take the form of violent demonstrations, police beatings, and military action.