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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-labor, 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.”
What I like about this poem is the last line, its simplicity, its freshness. The last word– “wait”– jars you, because you have to search back to three lines before for the rhyme. When you first hear it it seems as though it’s coming out of nowhere, and then you think, “Oh, right. State/wait. Now I get it.” There’s a little click that happens in your head as the poem feels “right” again.
In the same way, that line’s calm, inexorable message–”They also serve who only stand and wait”–brings a life back into balance. Milton wrote this poem (we conjecture) when he was 42 and going blind.* From the time he was a teenager at university, he had known himself to have an extraordinary capacity for poetry, and he planned to write a great verse epic, following the model of Homer and Vergil but with a distinctly English theme, perhaps focusing on a great king and warrior such as King Arthur. He knew that he could be the greatest poet of the English language.
And then he began to lose his sight.
Milton does not generally stoop to hyperbole (at least, not in my memory), and so the line, “And that one talent which is death to hide” stands out all the more–you almost think that he means it literally. The frustration, the anger of feeling as though God has given you gifts which God both expects you to use and is at the same time keeping you from using, the agony of watching the best part of yourself go to waste–they practically drip off the page, all the more awful because they come from the carefully chosen, measured, lucid voice of a middle-aged scholar. Milton never loses control, but that does not lessen his despair or his fear that he will fail God as he fails to develop his gifts.
And then–
“God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.” Milton finds that he has mistaken his essential mission. The best part of himself is not his creative genius, no matter how mighty it may be; it is his willingness to do his best with everything that has been given to him, not just the parts he is proud of.
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Click.
*Of course, 42 would have been on the far side, not the near side, of middle age at that time, creating one of the perennial scholarly problems of the poem. Why would he say that his light is spent “ere half my days” then? Is he writing about a figurative blindness, or writer’s block? Is he changing his age to heighten the pathos of the poem (not likely, to my mind–given how personal it feels, I don’t think he’s that interested in creating an elaborate poetic alter ego)? Or does he just assume he’ll live to be 85?
