A Grief, Observed or Embelished? - John Milton's 23rd Sonnet On His Deceased Wife

Grief is the heaviest void for a heart to bear. The esteemed C. S. Lewis poignantly pens the mourning of his own late wife, “Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the world so difficult to learn?” At the loss of one dearly loved, the one left behind must cope with the world upside down, almost a child again – a child who has to learn to breathe, crawl, and walk all over again. John Milton was no stranger to this burden: before his own death, he had experienced the death of a child, spousal separation, the death of his first wife, the death his son, the loss of his sight, and the death of his second wife. While the sonnet is largely autobiographical, through an exploration of the author’s syntax and uses of metaphor, all of Milton’s grievances and losses are dramatically represented in the fourteen short lines of his twenty-third sonnet on his deceased wife.

For his twenty-third sonnet, John Milton uses the Petrarchan or Italian style sonnet. Babette Deutsch describes in the Poetry Handbook that a sonnet is usually a non-lyrical poem (not meant to be sung), composed at the length of fourteen lines. The first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet are called an octave; traditionally, an Italian sonnet’s first octave conceptually introduces a problem to the reader. The last six lines are called a sestet, and, in the sestet, the solution to the problem is found. In historical context, this formula worked best for the sharing of many ideas regarding political turmoil and leadership critique, which, according to Thomas Wheeler’s article in Studies in Philology, Milton was no stranger to. (512) Highly involved with political criticism under the reign of the elected Oliver Cromwell, Milton possesses an inexhaustible repertoire of written publications spanning from apologetic theology to this small, unusually intimate sonnet.

What makes his twenty-third sonnet separate from the rest is the complex emotionality of grief. Instead of introducing some sort of political or theological problem in the first octave, the speaker describes a vision of his “late espoused saint”, “vested all in white”. While many others might summon bumbling paranormal exterminators to rid themselves of ghosts, the speaker of the sonnet articulates desire to be close to his Wife again saying, “I trust to have / Full sight of her in heaven without restraint.” These are two factual autobiographical elements expressed: Milton’s loss of his wife (an event he experiences twice and a half) and the loss of his sight. This complicates poetry’s usual tactic of embellishing the truth. William Riley Parker observes that the sonnet was historically taken literally given Milton’s context of loss; both his first and second wives died due to complications with childbirth. (235) Parker posits the challenge that Milton might not be mourning the loss of one specific wife, but instead this is the voice of a lonely man craving the pure companionship of a beloved woman.

Eva Feder Kittay would name the speaker of the sonnet a man dependent on woman. Kittay posits that creative Man makes Woman the other, and uses her as a metaphor for to define all his life experiences. (70) She becomes “the vehicle for the self-conception and activities of man, [who is] the subject, the topic.” (66) Milton’s sonnet explores the problem of a man’s loneliness after he is separated from his wife by death. Both quatrains in the first octave begin with the speaker’s self “Methought I…” and “Mine”. The apparition of Wife is written as illusory and antagonistic. She is “washed from spot” and “pure as her mind”. The blind speaker says he can visually perceive the “Love, sweetness, goodness” radiating from her twice hidden face: hidden by a veil, and hidden by his recent physical blindness. This blindness may have a third layer as this idyllic visage is based on Milton’s proposal of companionship and marriage, as Thomas Wheeler suggests, “Milton's habitual practice in writing about real people is to present them in idealized forms. He sees in them the embodiment of learning, piety, chastity, wisdom, or whatever.” (512) The sonnet in poetry and Milton in his mind have done what dreams in every mind do: express reality and emotion in its own (and in Milton’s case, dramatic) way through metaphor. After all, poetry does not have any restriction to represent accurate facts. (511)

Most emphatic of the speaker’s loneliness is the closing sestet. As previously mentioned, the goal of the last six lines of Italian sonnet is to propose the solution to the problem built by the first eight lines. Here, again, Milton expresses his grief by upsetting the usual pattern of things. The speaker of the sonnet says, “Her face was veiled…” He is separated from this woman by death, idealistic virtue, his own blindness, and this veil that covers her face. Theordore Ziolkowski explains the history of veils in metaphor: "veils themselves bear no meaning; is is their only function to conceal that which lies behind them." (66) He talks about the biblical story of the Temple curtain, a veil that concealed the Holy of Holies from the unholy masses. Perhaps this same concept Milton reflects in giving the amorphous wife a veil while describing her virtue. His unholy, living state separates him from love, sweetness and goodness.

Eva Kittay claims that "Man identifies that which he wants and desires, or has acquired or fears acquiring, as Woman," even to identifying Woman as "Death itself." (63) This spirit of acquisition is reflected in how the speaker possessively claims his wife "Mine" in the second quatrain. Even choosing to cut off the line "And as such as yet once more I trust to have" before completing the phrase in the next line "Full sight of her" implies acquistion over spousal partnership. Thus, the true subject of the sonnet is not Milton's wife but Milton himself and the void he needs to fill with images of her. A fanciful solution to the problem of separation is brought the sonnet’s first quatrain in an allusion to Heracles’ rescue of Alcetis. If only some hero could unite the sonnet’s speaker to his virtuous, angelic spouse.

The real, pitiful loneliness of the sonnet is embodied in its composition. It is wholly the expression of void, a man who "has nowhere to live but in his mind", says Wheeler, "he has not even the remembrance of an ideal marriage, only the ideal itself which he cannot seize in the midst of his darkness." (514) The closing of the poem is far from the solution to loneliness, it is the underlining-punctuation-emphasizing-bolding-hashtaging of grief.

          "But O as to embrace me she inclined,
          I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."

Excuse me as I lose all semblance of academics but, fuck, damn, and shit. If those last two lines do not reduce you to a primordial mush of emotion and loss, we need to have a talk about pathos. Says William Riley Parker, "The last line, with its syntactical flurry of excitement followed by a dreary march of monosyllables, contains perhaps the most affecting ten words in all of English poetry." (238) This is affect of grief, expressed as simply as possible. If joy and unity is fullness, loss is so much more empty and dark. The dream, the ideal, the sight of virtue in dreams is cut off by the daytime. For one night, one dream, Milton regains figurative vision and the presence of his Wife. Daylight, usually a symbol of joy, fertility, and happiness is condemned for severing this union. Even as the poetic ideal of Wife and Woman is exclaimed for the first part of the sonnet and Milton waxes on about his full experience in loss, this last line, with its single-syllabic tone of defeat is completely full of cold, hard reality.

Works Cited

Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. Fourth ed. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1982. Print.

Kittay, Eva Feder. "Woman as Metaphor." Hypatia Summer 3.2 (1988): 63-86. JTSOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.Print.

Milton, John. "On His Deceased Wife." 100 Best Loved Poems. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 15. Print. Dover Thrift Editions.

Parker, William Riley. "Milton's Last Sonnet." The Review of English Studies July 21.83 (1945): 235-38. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

Wheeler, Thomas. "Milton's Twenty-Third Sonnet." Studies in Philology July 58.3 (1961): 510-15. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. "The Veil as Metaphor and as Myth." Religion & Literature Summer 40.2 (2008): 61-81. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.