When I Consider How My Light is Spent

As a religious sect, as a culture, and as a people, the Puritans were decidedly restless in a material world. Every element of the world around them dazzled with quiet testimony to the power and glory of a God whose omnipotence, whose majesty would be too much to bear if ever glimpsed directly. The Puritans could not endure for the world to be even for a moment only what it is. For a Puritan apologist such as Milton to shape the sonnet around the metaphor of a man who fears he has squandered, even lost his light, would be to use light as more than a literal representation of failed eyesight. Light, within the Puritan culture, symbolizes illumination, wisdom, insight corrected to and directed by alignment with the glories of the Creator God: See the world not for what it is but for what God is.

Thus, as a chronicle of the journey into illumination, the reclamation of the light that matters, the poem begins in darkness and closes in light. It is not an easy journey. When the poet fears his light is spent, that is misspent, by focusing too narrowly on his physical disability and the years that have passed, he has become too taken by his own position within God’s creation.