`Things He Can See But He Just Cannot Touch'

My oldest son, who is finishing his sophomore year in college, sent me an email Monday morning with this message:

“What do you think about when you read this sonnet by Milton?

“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."

For his class in the epic, Joshua recently read Paradise Lost for the first time. I knew he had completed a paper on the significance of Milton’s blindness, but I was uncertain exactly what he was asking, so I wrote a quick reply:

“Apart from Milton's own blindness, in my mind it's always linked with the Battle of Britain, 1940, especially the famous final line. I associate it with quiet, unheralded courage -- the civilians who endured the Nazi raids.”

My reply was ridiculously idiosyncratic, one of those mental linkages we make that cannot be critically defended. It turns out Joshua focused largely on Paradise Lost in his paper, but cited Sonnet 19 in passing, and his professor had asked him to elaborate. I suggested he look at the theme of blindness in Sophocles and Shakespeare, in which the unseeing becomes a seer. Also, the sonnet’s first line inevitably recalls the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15, “When I consider every thing that grows…” When I asked Joshua what associations the sonnet carried for him, he said the last line in particular reminded him of Dylan’s lyrics on John Wesley Harding. I can hear the echoes and I’m sure Christopher Ricks (author of Milton’s Grand Style and Dylan’s Visions of Sin) would agree. Since it came out almost 40 years ago, I’ve always judged it among Dylan’s best albums. The lyrics have a hard, parable-like clarity, and seem to stand in the shadow of Vietnam without overt mention of the war. Like Milton’s sonnet, the songs allude densely to scripture. Keep “They also serve who only stand and wait" in mind as you read (or listen to) the second verse of “Dear Landlord,” which even brings in the theme of vision:

“Dear landlord,
Please heed these words that I speak.
I know you've suffered much,
But in this you are not so unique.
All of us, at times, we might work too hard
To have it too fast and too much,
And anyone can fill his life up
With things he can see but he just cannot touch.”

Joshua has pulled this and more together and elaborated on Milton’s blindness. Like me, he has a taste for linkage, charting continuities across centuries. On an undistinguished work day, attending to what’s in front of us, we take the time to commune with Milton and Dylan and others, and feel a little less disconnected, a little more human. Art blurs into our lives, becomes second nature. This resonates with something I had reread the night before, from Theodore Dalrymple’s essay “A Lost Art,” in Our Culture, What’s Left of It:

“Art, in its highest expression, explains our existence to us, both the particularities of the artist’s own time and the universals of all time, or at least of all human history. It transcends transience and therefore reconciles us to the most fundamental condition of our existence.”