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“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” A sonnet provides a poet with a set of implied but strict guidelines that they must follow in order for their poem to be considered a legitimate sonnet. In Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” the struggle between a physically handicapped man and ironically his lack of “blind” faith in the truth of God is exposed. The question and answer form that is usually associated a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet allows the reader to understand the speaker’s conscience. However, Milton chooses to utilize the question and answer sequence of this sonnet to emphasize the poem’s overall theme, and to further support the notion that as the speaker realizes he does not need God. The poem is literally about a man who is blind, and thus his God-given talent, which is the ability to write, is useless to him and to God. Although a possible translation of the “Talent” could be translated into a monetary value because of its biblical implication, the more accurate definition is “the ability to write,” because you can not write in the dark, and Milton himself went blind by the end of his life. “Doth God exact day-labor, light denied,”(7) shows that the speak