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.”
Triumphs:
If there is one reason I love this sonnet, it's the way John Milton, who was a prodigy, a busybody, and the very definition of a tryhard, manages to cast himself as a patient sufferer who only "stand[s] and wait[s]." I do not in any way mean to make light of Milton's actual blindness, which does seem to have been a trial to him, but the pose of martyrdom is truly an artistic tour-de-force. How does he do it? Well, first of all, he never actually says that he is standing, waiting, or anything of the sort. He's not even, necessarily, patient! The entire sestet is ventriloquized through the character of patience, speaking to him, while Milton's response is implied it is very much not explicit. In fact, the famous last sentence is, if anything, a distancing effect: it is not "you" or "I" who "also serve who only stand and wait" but "They"--as if even in the climactic moment of the poem Milton could not bring himself to actually commit to being the stationary one. At the same time, giving that much of the poem over to patience still gives the impression of the author being patient, and listening to patience, even as he fails to respond to what it has to say.
There is also a great play on the word "spent" at the end of line 1. It's only when we start out on the enjambed line 2 ("Ere half my days") that we can tell "spent" means "used up" and not simply "used." "My light is spent" could, after all, refer to how one passes the day--how the light, the "day-labour" that the speaker refers to later, is "spent" day by day. It only comes to certainly mean "I have no access to light," which is not actually an instinctive meaning for the words, once we understand both the biography of the author (always a dangerous source in a genre that is inherently imaginative) and once we try to parse "spent/Ere half my days," which definitely calls for spent as "used up." And yet the other sense of spent keeps raising its head--the sestet is, after all, about ways to spend time. They also serve who spend their light standing and waiting.
The religious references in the poem are also a great effect. The intertwining of the parable of the talents with the issue of Milton's talents in the modern sense is very well done, and of course resonates with the third sense of spent, "exchanged like money," which is an active concern within the parable. And then we get a typical Miltonic attempt to square the circle of God's might and human obligation: God doesn't actually need any of what we do; doing what God has assigned us, what his "mild yoke" has led us to, is the best service, and straining against that yoke is the only real sin. In this, especially in "His State/Is Kingly" we get the sense, recognizable from Paradise Lost if nowhere else, that for Milton the key fact of God is precisely that He (and Milton's God is definitely He) is inherently above the questions that seem so vital to humanity.
Imperfections:
This poem, as with many Petrarchan sonnets, gets a little too cutesy at the volta, the turn between octave and sestet. In doing so, it makes a characteristic Miltonic change to normal English word order, shoving the actual action of the sentence as far back as possible and inserting what looks like a Latinate ablative absolute along the way: ""Does God exact day-labour, light denied?"/I fondly ask." "Light denied" here is really bent over backwards for the rhyme, and another delay of the verb comes in the next sentence to allow "prevent" as the final rhyme in the octave. But the most notable point is that "fondly ask" is actually the verb of the sentence that takes the entire first seven lines! This is very Milton, but it's also pretty annoying when you try to actually figure out what he's saying. When he considers his blindness and his talent being "Lodged with [him] useless," then he asks (fondly) about whether God exacts day-labour. It's a gorgeous poem, which makes it easy to miss this, but it's a terrible sentence. Which is, in a lot of ways, what Milton is all about.
