Question

Q2 Describe how the poem 'On his Blindness' begins on a note of sadness but ends in a mood of
acceptance and resignation. [10 Marks]

Answer 1

Answer:

Milton went blind working for the English Republic. His service to the government required that he extensively read and write. This caused him to lose his sight.

The poem takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. These traditionally focus on love and romance, but Milton subverts this in order to explore his 30relationship with God.

Milton fears that his blindness will prevent him 0from doing God's work. The personification of Patience tells him that even his idleness is useful to God if he continues to have faith.John Milton’s poem “On His Blindness” is an autobiographical sonnet in which Milton meditates on his own loss of sight. For most of his life, Milton had been able to see perfectly, but his late-night reading and writing on behalf of the government of the short-lived English Republic, in which he held a very prominent position, helped ruin his eyesight. This sonnet—written in the “Petrarchan” rhyme scheme associated with the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca—is divided into an eight-line “octave” and a six-line “sestet.” The octave rhymes abba abba. The sestet rhymes cde cde. The sonnet is therefore a typical Petrarchan sonnet in form, but in subject matter, the poem departs from the topics usually associated with Petrarchan poems. Petrarch (the English version of Petrarca’s name) was most famous for writing about love; Milton departs from that conventional topic to deal with a very practical, very physical problem, but a problem with many broader spiritual implications.