“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658them. The second quatrain offers Cyriack an invitation couched in imperative and
immediate terms, to spend a “cheerful hour” of lightsome conversation: “To day
deep thoughts resolve with me to drench / In mirth, that after no repenting drawes.”
“Drench” implies, without saying as much, that wine will accompany and help pro-
duce the mirth. Milton urges that they give over deep subjects like mathematics and
politics that presumably often concern them (“What the Swede intend, and what the
French”). The first quatrain holds Coke forth as a model for the proper interpretation
of laws; Skinner by analogy must learn “To measure life” and its laws correctly, not
wrench them. The sestet offers teacherly advice. Cyriack should give primary atten-
tion to what will produce “solid good,” and keep other duties in perspective, recog-
nizing that Heaven disapproves “that care, though wise in show, / That with
superfluous burden loads the day, / And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.”
In his second sonnet to Skinner, “Cyriack, this three years day,” Milton revisits
the subject of his blindness three years after it became total,^152 explicitly pairing and
contrasting this with his earlier sonnet on that topic. The two sonnets trace the
Miltonic speaker’s progress from an early struggle to cope with despondency, through
patient waiting on God’s time, to the attainment of a new confidence and optimism.
The poem’s cheerful, even triumphant mood seems somewhat forced, revealing,
perhaps, Milton’s desire to give good example to his student and friend but also his
need to cheer himself up periodically by recalling what he has accomplished and
what he means still to do. Like the first blindness sonnet this one sets rhetorical
speech over against Petrarchan metrics. The first five-and-a-half lines state the pain-
ful loss: the eyes (orbs), though clear to outward view, no longer have sight of those
other orbs, “Sun or Moon or Starre,” or “man or woman.” The next segment, with
the octave completed in the middle of line nine, insists that he does not argue against
Heaven (as before), but can now “bear up & steer / Right onward.” The image of
a pilot boldly steering a ship with helm “up” into the wind constrasts sharply with
the speaker’s earlier position among those who “only stand and waite.” As if in
answer to a question from Cyriack, the rest of the sestet states the grounds of his
confidence: pride that he has willingly sacrificed his vision “in libertyes defence,”
and assurance that God will prove a “better guide” for his journey than those celes-
tial orbs he can no longer steer by. While his supposition that “all Europe talks from
side to side” about his Defensio is an exaggeration, that work did prompt many letters
and visits from the learned of Europe. His concluding epithet terming the world a
“vain mask” suggests both the follies of that debased genre and also the world’s
manifold deceptions, which the blind man’s keen spiritual vision may penetrate.
The poignant sonnet, “Mee thought I saw my late espoused saint,” makes a
contrasting pair with this last poem on blindness, as, after that almost too confident
affirmation, Milton portrays himself brought low by the death of his wife, over-
whelmed by the sense of loss and darkness. This poem merges the sonnet with the
dream–vision: there are precedents for that in the Petrarchan tradition,^153 but none
that strike so intense a note of personal love, grief, pain, and loss. It is one of the