“For the Sake of Liberty” 1652–16549
“Tireless... for the Sake of Liberty”
1652–1654
Milton was at least somewhat prepared for the onset of total blindness in February
or March, 1652. With his left eye already useless, he had been relying more and
more on readers and amanuenses during the past three years as he gradually lost
sight in the right eye. Despite periods of despondency he refused to give way to
self-pity or to resign his secretarial office with its duties and opportunities for action
in the world. By training his prodigious memory he found a way to fulfill those
duties, digesting material read to him and dictating translations to council scribes.
For his own writings he called on various assistants – sometimes paid secretaries but
often friends and former pupils, including his two nephews.^1 John Phillips was
probably part of his household during much of this period. But if blindness could
be anticipated, other calamities that spring could not. Mary Powell died in May at
age twenty-seven, three days after giving birth to a daughter, Deborah. And about
six weeks later Milton’s only son John died. Milton kept working, but the impact
of such losses in such short order must have been devastating.
Political and personal anxieties led Milton to find his poetic voice again in 1652,
after (apparently) a four-year hiatus. He turned to the small form of the sonnet,
using it as he had in the Fairfax sonnet for panegyric linked to political exhortation;
and in the famous sonnet on his blindness he forced that genre to new heights of
emotional poignancy and formal complexity. He also came to England’s defense
again – and his own – against another formidable Latin attack published on the
Continent as a continuation of Salmasius’s project. Now, however, the govern-
ment Milton defended was Cromwell’s Protectorate, so he had to reformulate some
core political principles: now it is not parliament but the Protector who is worthiest
to govern and whose government offers the best hope of preserving religious and
civil liberties. Characteristically, both in this Defensio Secunda (1654) and in sonnets
to Cromwell and his friend Henry Vane, Milton took up again the role of adviser to
the state and its leaders, urging his own radical program of toleration and church