“For the Sake of Liberty” 1652–1654tion on the plosive consonant “d” we are forced to read slowly and with great
emphasis, indeed almost to spit out, his bitter question to the universe: “Doth God
exact day-labour, light deny’d?” Then, after a short pause to take the emotional
force of that question, it is qualified and brought under judgment by the run-on to
the next line, “I fondly ask.” The changes in tempo in the final lines are also strik-
ing: the pseudo-onomatopoeia of “Thousands at his bidding speed” force the voice
to mimic that haste. Then the last line achieves a stately dignity as its perfect iambics
beat out a solemn drumbeat: “They also serve who only stand and waite.” Milton
has created here a sonnet whose form is emblematic of its matter: an agonized
rebellion that challenges providential order but is yet contained within it is mir-
rored by disruptions in rhythm and tempo that are yet contained within the metri-
cal pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet. He must have found considerable reassurance in
using his talent to create this small masterpiece.
In the Defensio Secunda Milton has moved from attentive standing and waiting to
vigorous political action. In no other work of his are the representations of self and
nation so thoroughly and complexly intertwined, and in no other prose work is
there such a range of tones – from high heroic and panegyric, to earnest argument
and self-defense, to urgent exhortation and admonition, to witty word-play, to
fierce invective. The body of the work follows the main divisions of the Clamor,
but Milton offers only brief summaries of his earlier justifications for the regicide,
which are almost lost alongside the panegyric, satiric, and admonitory passages.
Like the Areopagitica, this work is imagined as a classical oration with exordium,
narrative, proofs, and peroration; Milton refers to it as “my speech” and calls atten-
tion to the perhaps too lofty “exordium” and the very long “proem” or preface
(CPW IV.1, 548, 554, 557). But the Defensio Secunda is much more closely related
to oral composition and performance than was Areopagitica with its celebration of
the book and the liberty of printing. By the same token Milton’s most recent po-
lemics – Eikonoklastes and the Defensio – are texts which engage directly with other
written texts and attempt to disable them through textual analysis and response. To
the contrary, the Defensio Secunda engages with a work imagined as oral, a Cry
which also incorporates a scathing ad hominem assault on Milton. He responds with
an answer in kind, a prosecution of More citing evidence and witnesses. That re-
sponse frames their encounter as an agonistic debate concerned less with argument
than with ethical proof, the character of the authors: on the one hand the lecherous,
treacherous, priapic More, and on the other, a Milton who is not as he has been
described but the precise opposite: attractive, virile, chaste, honorable, a heroic
defender of the state at the cost of his eyes, and a blameless servant of God.^141
Milton is not concerned here to interpret events but to establish the character of the
several actors: on the one hand the debased Salmasius, More, and Charles, and by
contrast, the noble Cromwell, Bradshaw, Queen Christina, Fairfax, and Milton.
Milton consciously models himself on the classical rhetor, expecially those noble
defenders of liberty, Cicero and Demosthenes. But, typically, he expects to outdo