When Eyes Fail
Bearing the Mild Yoke in Milton’s Sonnet 19 (On His Blindness)
I’ve been thinking about the limits of our physical bodies and the distress we can feel when they seem to fail us in various ways. We tend to view weakness, exhaustion, hunger, pain, injury and disease as impediments or failures on our part when we encounter them in our lives. There’s a fine line between discomfort, which pushes us to grow stronger, and distress, which indicates the limits of our mind and body. The body is capable of incredible things, often achievements that the mind doesn’t realize are possible; but the body also has limits. These limits aren’t meant to harm us or keep us from greatness, but to remind us of our humanity, of our need for help, and of our capacity for a kind of greatness that may not look like the one we imagine for ourselves.
One of my favorite writers knew a lot about the limits of the physical body and the fear involved in losing certain capacities that we often take for granted. I don’t know if I inherited my love of reading - specifically of reading the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Pope and the likes - from my grandfather; but he has always been my person for sharing thoughts about these authors and their timeless works. John Milton, a 17th century politician and poet, is best known for his epic Paradise Lost. This work relays the Biblical accounts of creation, the fall of the angels, the garden of Eden, and the fall of man in such an intimately human and dynamic extension of the mythology presented in the Old Testament. Milton presents the world with a masterpiece that not only gives more life to a tale as old as time, but he accomplishes the greater feat of making it something deeply relatable to and reflective of the human experience. Milton also has a bunch of poetry; I haven’t read all of it, but I have a favorite of the ones with which I’m familiar. I’ve always been particularly drawn to one of his sonnets, a form that traditionally presents an issue of emotional tension that is either resolved or examined more closely in the closing lines. The tension in this sonnet is one personal to Milton, but it bears a universal truth for any of us who face the unknown path of living when pieces of ourselves seem to fail us.
Sonnet 19, commonly known as “On His Blindness”, is a vulnerable, honest expression of the poet’s fear and anxiety as he comes to terms with a life without sight. I recall bringing my big Milton anthology to my grandfather’s lake house one summer and sitting out on the porch looking through it with him, and we read this sonnet at that time. I don’t remember what we said about it or how our conversation diverged onto other topics, but I remember what the day felt like and how he looked as he leaned over the pages or settled back to look at me as we talked.
I think that a lot of the real value in life lies in quiet shared experiences like this one. Not when we’re basking in the glory of our talents, but when we’re mindful of and grateful for just being in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. It’s taken me a while to understand this gift that is so easily accessible yet somehow obscured in plain sight, and it took me more than a few reads to see the presence of this truth in Milton’s sonnet, which I had always interpreted as a despairing farewell to his known life. As I read it now, considering what my own eyes have been opened to, I can see that despite this fear of the unknown and of his imminent loss, Milton embraces a simple courage and trust in God’s plan in these fourteen lines.
Sonnet 19 (On His Blindness)
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.”
In more modern language, Milton’s sonnet says: When I consider how I’ve spent my time, about half my life, before I lose my vision and live in darkness, in a condition when my great talent will sit useless inside me, I want more than ever to do something great with it to glorify God with my writing so that he doesn’t criticize me for doing nothing. I foolishly ask, “Doesn’t God require us to work even when we can’t see?” Patience calms me, reminding me that God doesn’t need anything from us. Those who can accept our lot in life and endure are the ones who best serve Him. He is a King, and he has thousands at his command, but he is also served by those who wait for their reward with patience.
Milton’s mid-life crisis - the issue presented in the first half - is rooted in the belief that his worth lies only in his ability to write. He’s a fantastic writer, and he knows it; but he also knows that this talent, which he capitalized as an allusion to the Biblical Parable of the Talents, has been given to him by God for a purpose. However, as he faces the imminent loss of his sight, something he considers vital to his practice of writing, he cannot conceive of how to best serve God if he cannot write. Writing for him looks like long hours in a candlelit room with pen and ink. It’s a personal and solitary practice, and as he anticipates the impending loss of independence that will accompany his blindness, Milton also faces the crisis of how to live, let alone write, in a state of darkness. He fears that he has something to offer the world through his writing that will remain unspoken in him on account of his failure to find a means of channeling his thoughts into written words for the world to read.
The Parable of the Talents tells of a man who entrusts a certain number of talents (a unit of money) to three of his servants. While two of those servants use their money to invest and increase the value initially entrusted to them, the third servant (who has also been given the least: only one talent) hides his talent in the ground out of fear that the talent is of too little value to merit anything great. That man is chided and punished for his action, which his master calls slothful and wicked. We learn from this story that we each enjoy different measures of talent and blessings in our lives, and God expects us to use those abilities and circumstances for a greater good. My previous essay on Chariots of Fire reflects on runner Eric Liddell’s practice of his talent for running in this way. He runs to glorify his Maker and to build deeper connections with his congregation. Like Liddell, Milton knows that he has a talent that sets him apart from others, and he wants to use that talent for something great. He fears the new limitations that blindness will impose on his ability to use this talent, which prompts his question. The word “fondly” used here has a meaning closer to “foolish” in the Middle English lexicon, so Milton calls attention to his own foolishness in asking if God’s expectations of him remain high even with his impending loss of vision.
Milton expresses a deeply human fear here. That fear of being seen as someone who uses a disability to make excuses. There is a difference between what we physically can’t do and what we choose not to do out of inconvenience or discomfort. Part of Milton’s fear lies in his thought that he can still produce writing, but he doesn’t yet know how he will go about it. Part of the fear is rooted in his belief that writing is over for him, and a great amount of fear arises from the fact that he expects so much more from himself before that happens. The truth is that he doesn’t know what life will look like in darkness, and the unknown element terrifies him. When patience steps into the sonnet to answer his question, it brings the assurance that God doesn’t need works or gifts from us. Being King of Heaven, he needs nothing that we can produce through the talents he himself gave us to begin with. He doesn’t ask us to give anything at all in the way of earthly achievements or wealth. He expects us to do our best with the lot given us in life.
As Milton writes, those who “best bear his mild yoke” are the ones who serve him best. The “mild yoke” refers to whatever circumstances and connections have been joined to our lives. The word “mild” in Middle English means “gracious” or “gentle”; a yoke summons the vision of that wooden crosspiece used to harness the labor of farm animals. However, calling this yoke mild, Milton suggests that this structure is not a burden too heavy for anyone to endure. The very nature of a yoke also implies that our burdens are not meant to be born by any one person alone. A yoke joins two animals so that they might pull their load together. So if our best service in life is to bear a mild yoke, we have the assurance that not only is our burden gentle and gratifying, but it is also one designed for us to bear in company of others. This mild yoke also echoes another crosspiece well known in Christian mythology: the cross born by Jesus at his crucifixion. Unlike our mild yoke, the cross was placed on Jesus with the intention that he bear it alone and that he carry it as a form of punishment and public humiliation. Jesus embraced it and made it a symbol of love and strength, despite the cruel intentions of his persecutors. But he does not impose a cross of that caliber on us. God doesn’t intend our burdens to punish, torture or shame us, but to be something we shoulder together in order to live our best lives. I think the mild yoke is just life with all its ups and downs. Our mild yokes include our families in all their chaotic glory, our abilities to excel in certain sports or classes and our weaknesses and inabilities in other areas. They contain everything from relationships to broken bones, from loss to love, and they definitely include our struggles with addiction. They are bearable even when they seem impossible to carry alone, because we’re not meant to carry them alone. We can’t best bear them when we attempt to do that.
It’s so easy to slip into the mode of thinking that we can’t handle the weight of our particular burdens in life, that we don’t deserve the lot granted us, or that we have to deal with our struggles alone. That thinking contributed a lot to my drinking; I just kept having these deluded opinions about everything given to me in life, failing to see anything as part of God’s plan for me. Something terrible would happen, and I believed I couldn’t possibly live with the pain. Something good would happen, and I’d self sabotage out of fear that it wasn’t really in the cards for me. In all things, I believed I had to figure it out on my own; and though I’ve never physically attempted to shoulder a real live yoke on my own, I imagine it would be the kind of difficult endeavor that would make just collapsing under the weight of it seem the only plausible outcome. Looking back, I can see situations that I could have handled a lot more gracefully if I’d just been able to accept reality or welcome help. These are skills I’m working on now as I move forward with life in recovery, which has a whole new variety of blessings and struggles. When I encounter hardships that give me that urge to collapse or curl into myself rather than move forward, it’s almost always because I’m anticipating dealing with it on my own rather than viewing it as a shared burden.
I was recently reminded of the good that can come from our struggles when more than one person at one of my home groups mentioned the cyclical nature of hardship in life. Hardship is a universal experience, but it can feel so acutely personal and isolating. When we’re able to share our experiences, we not only invite help and support into our lives, but we also create an opportunity for our struggle to help others by power of example, by giving room to be of service, and by creating a space for deeper connections to grow as we bear the mild yoke together. There’s a line in the AA Promises that tells us we will “see how our experience can benefit others,” and I see that happening every time someone takes the risk to be vulnerable and share the pieces of his or her life that cause fear, shame or uncertainty. It makes me feel less alone in my own head that feels constantly flooded with those same feelings to varying degrees, and seeing how others are moving forward even with the weight of these burdens helps me trust that there is no burden in my life or the lives of my loved ones that will break us if we choose to bear it with shared strength.
The last line of Milton’s sonnet has given me some difficulty in the past and still isn’t entirely clear to me, but I think I have a better sense of what he’s saying and how it might contribute to these thoughts. Those also serve who only stand and wait - it seems to justify hanging around and doesn’t seem to compliment the moral given to us by the Parable of the Talents. But when taken in context of the speaker who faces a life without his talent, I can see that standing and waiting isn’t so much about not using our talents as it is about acceptance. In the time that Milton was writing, the word “stand” denoted a stronger state of being than merely occupying a stagnant position. The word as used in Old English and Middle English variations meant “to encounter without flinching or retreating” (1590s) and to “endure successfully” (c. 1600). So to stand and wait does not imply the kind of idle patience we practice as we wait in traffic or for the MBTA vehicles of current notoriety in Boston. To stand and wait in Milton’s understanding is to endure, to stand firm in spite of hardship and to wait with the belief that this current suffering is part of a plan greater than our minds can fully comprehend.
We put so much emphasis on what we can do in this life that we sometimes miss the value in simply enduring with no output to show for our lives. God has given each of us unique talents and placed us in specific circumstances that create opportunities for us to live well by excelling, by creating, by giving or by leading. But how do we live our best lives when the vehicles by which we go through the world fail us? How do we come to terms with the reality that our bodies are only material and that much of life is beyond our control? We are all called to be great, but oftentimes we mistake this calling for the achievements our physical bodies have been capable of doing in this life. Our talents and achievements in this life can serve great purposes, but these are not our true callings; at their best, they function as extensions of the greatness we are all called to regardless of our abilities and circumstances.
This higher level of greatness requires some waiting because it’s not something we can achieve on our own. The very nature of waiting involves acceptance of forces beyond our capacity to control. We wait for a train to arrive, for a friend to get ready, for a sibling to get out of the shower, for a guest to knock at the door, for a feeling to pass, or for the right time. When I trained my dog to wait, I used treats to reward her for listening. She, and every other dog who successfully learns this command, masters that command because they develop trust in a certain positive outcome. We can learn a lot from dogs in this sense. They wait because they have trust in the person telling them to do so, and they accept that the person telling them to wait will reward them even when they don’t see or know about the reward. Good dogs wait because they trust in the circumstances outside their control to ultimately turn out as they should. Good dog owners reciprocate this trust with positive reinforcement and acknowledgement of the waiting. We’re not so good at waiting because, unlike the dogs, we think we can bring about our own rewards. This belief drives our attempts to earn success, acceptance and glory through our various skill sets. We use our talents not as ends in themselves, but as our means to attain rewards that we believe wouldn’t come to us otherwise.
It’s hard to accept when we can’t access the talents we rely on for gratification. Physical excellence occupies such a central part of our human existence - look at the Olympic Games, the popularity of superheroes, and the way in which we place athletes on a pedestal - so when we lose our ability to accomplish even the small physical achievements of our known lives, such as walking up stairs without assistance or listening to music without an aid, we struggle to see our worth and ability to live meaningful lives. We are absolutely meant to use our abilities and talents as best we can in this life, but we can find solace in the reminder that when we lose access to those capacities, there is an ‘also’ waiting for us. “Those also serve who only stand and wait.” Milton’s line gives us another available path for the time when it seems that our familiar modes of living well are closed to us.
Milton didn’t know how his life would look in blindness, but he channeled the talent remaining in him despite his physical loss and gave us Paradise Lost, the treasure that contains so much of the human experience, and more. He didn’t do it alone. He composed this epic after losing his sight, so he relied on the assistance of others - mainly his daughters - to write down the passages he committed to memory each night. In this painstaking way, he authored 10,550 lines. He chose not to bear the yoke of his blindness alone, and his ability to trust his words to the hands of his family and other scribes resulted in one of the greatest literary works in the English language. That’s a lot of lines for any writer to put on paper, let alone to compose piece by piece in one’s mind without the luxury of seeing them all together in physical form. Paradise Lost and the other works he composed with this method of memorizing and dictating must owe a great deal of their greatness to the fact that their creator brought them to life by committing them to heart before giving them form on paper. They continue to serve a purpose even today, and they are evidence of a small reward for his patient endurance of a physical loss.
I don’t think it’s so much that we have to know exactly what we’re waiting for or when it will arrive, but how we wait that matters. If we can trust in a higher power, we can trust that He has a plan for everything that comes our way. We can trust that there is some meaning to the mild yoke we’re given in life, and that bearing it to the best of our ability, whether through forward progress or just waiting with the weight, we’re enough in His eyes.
