John Milton's On His Blindness 1673

John Milton‟s “On His Blindness” (1673)

When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness) Summary

The first seven and a half lines of this poem are one big, long, confusing sentence. Here's our summary: "When I think of how I have lost my vision even before middle age, and how I am unable to use my best talent to serve God, I want to ask if God requires his servants to work for him even if they don't have vision."

But before he can speak up, a figure called Patience answers his question. Patience is like, "You think God needs your work? No, man. His best servants are the ones who bear life's burden the best. He already has thousands of people running around across land and sea to serve him. You can just stand right there and wait on him, and that's enough."

Lines 1-2

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

• The speaker thinks about how all of his light has been used up ("spent") before even half his life is over. As a man without light, he now lives in a world that is both "dark and wide."
• The first word of the poem, "When," gives us an idea of the structure of the sentence that will follow. The structure is, "When this happens, that happens." As in, "When I broke the glass, I had to find a broom to sweep it up."
• But be careful – the second part of the sentence doesn't come until lines 7 and 8. Milton's audience was more used to reading dense and complicated sentences, so you'll want to take the first seven lines slowly. (That's OK, we also think Milton's audience would have had a doozy of a time figuring out text messaging.)
• Most readers believe that the poem is clearly about Milton's blindness, but the poem never directly refers to blindness or even vision. Instead, we think that "light" is a metaphor for vision.
• The metaphor is complicated. The speaker says that his light can be "spent," and this word suggests that he is thinking of something like an oil lamp. The light is "spent" when the oil in the lamp runs out. To make a contemporary comparison, it would be like someone comparing his vision to a flashlight that runs out of batteries before it is supposed to. Milton is suggesting that he got a bad deal.
• The word "spent" also makes us think of money. Milton is reflecting on how he has used or "spent" his vision, now that it is gone. Has he used it wisely, or did he fritter it away because he thought it would never run out?
• The word "ere" means "before." How does Milton know that he became blind before his life was halfway over? For this to be true, wouldn't he have to be some kind of psychic who knew when he was going to die? The usual explanation of this line is that Milton guesses roughly how long he will live. Milton went completely blind at the age of 42.
• Finally, calling the world "dark and wide" makes it sound like a scary place, doesn't it? Interestingly, Milton makes it seem as if the world has run out of light, rather than growing dark because of any blindness on his part.

Lines 3-4

And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, […]

• These lines are the trickiest in the entire poem, because they appear to be simpler then they are.
• The key word is "talent." You probably read "talent" and think of skills like throwing a perfect spiral or being a piano prodigy. But there's a double meaning intended for people who know history or Biblical scripture. In the ancient world, a "talent" was also a standard of weight used to measure money, just as a "pound" is a measure of both weight and currency.
• You can read Matthew 25 (it's short), but here's our brief summary of "The Parable of Talents." A lord gives three of his servants some money ("talents") to hold on to when he leaves for a trip. Two of the servants use the money to gain more money for their master. (In contemporary language, we'd call this 'investment.') But the third servant just buries the money, the ancient equivalent of hiding it under your mattress. When the lord returns, he's happy with the first two servants and gives them more responsibilities, but furious with the third servant. He exiles the third servant into the "darkness," which is the equivalent of "death."
• When Milton says that talent is "death to hide," he is referring to the money in the Biblical story and also to his own "talent," in the sense of a skill or trade.
• There is no way to tell what specific talent he means, but our guess would be his intelligence and his writing and reading skills, which he had used in service of Oliver Cromwell's government. This "talent" is "lodged" or buried within the speaker just like the money in the story. It cannot be used to make greater profit.

Lines 4-6

[…] though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;

• The speaker has just told us that his talent is as useless as money buried in the desert, but now he says that his uselessness has nothing to do with a lack of will. To the contrary, his soul desires (is "bent") to use his skills in the service of his "Maker," God.
• When he is faced with God, he wants to have a record of accomplishment to show Him.
• God is being compared with the lord from the "Parable of the Talents" in Matthew 25. When God "returns" to him like the master in the parable, the speaker wants to show that he has used his talents profitably.
• The word "account" here means both" story" and "a record of activities with money."
• If the speaker turns out to have wasted his profits, he worries that God will scold or "chide" him. And if God is anything like the lord from the parable, the speaker could get cast into a darkness even more fearful than the one created by his blindness.

Lines 7-8

"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. […]

• It has taken the speaker six lines to get through the part of the sentence that begins "When." Now he goes on to say what happens "when" he thinks about all the stuff he has described above. Namely, he wonders if God demands that people undertake hard, physical work, or "day-labour," when they don't have any light.
• The speaker doesn't have any light because he's blind, but in Milton's metaphor he compares this condition to having to do work at night that you would normally do during the day – like, say, building a house or plowing a field.
• The word "exact" means something like "charge," "claim," or "demand." You can "exact" a toll or a fee, for example. So the speaker wants to know if God demands work as a kind of payment that is due to Him.
• The first section of the poem is completed by the words "I fondly ask." The word "fondly" means "foolishly," not "lovingly." The speaker accuses himself of being a idiot for even thinking this question.
• Fortunately, "patience" steps in to prevent his foolishness. More on that in the next section.

Lines 8-10

[…] But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best

• "Patience" to the rescue! Patience is personified as someone who can talk sense into the speaker. Patience is often personified in Christian art because of its role in helping one to achieve important virtues like courage and wisdom.
• The speaker is about to "murmur" his foolish question about whether God would be so cruel as to make impossible demands of work, but then his patience steps in to stop him. The rest of the poem is the reply made by patience.
• First, patience points out that God does not need anything. God is complete and perfect. He doesn't need work or talents ("gifts") of any kind.

Line 11

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. […]

• Patience now scores its second point in the rebuttal to the speaker. Patience argues that those people are the best servants of God who allow their fates to be linked with and controlled by God, as if they were wearing a yoke.
• Essentially, this means accepting things as they come, especially suffering and misfortune.
• A "yoke" is a wood frame that is placed around the necks of farm animals, like oxen, so that they can be directed.
• Patience doesn't want to make God sound like a slave driver, so God's yoke is called "mild," or not-that-bad. It's not how much you have to show for your time on earth that counts, it's how you handle your submission to God.

Lines 11-14

[…] His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

• The final point made by patience is that God is like a king, not a lord, so the "Parable of the Talents" does not strictly apply.
• Lords need everyone on their estates to work for them; they usually don't have the resources to spend on keeping servants just to stand around and wait on them. Kings, on the other hand, have unlimited resources, especially if they control a "state" as large as the entire earth.
• With His kingly status, God has plenty of minions to do His "bidding" by rushing from place to place – that is, doing things that require light and vision. It doesn't make a difference whether one more person fulfills the role or not.
• But kings also have people who "wait" on them, who stand in a state of readiness until their action is needed.
• To summarize, we believe that the sentence, "His state is kingly," is meant to contrast with the "lordly" state of the master of the Biblical parable in Matthew 25.
• This being Milton, of course, "wait" can also have the meaning of waiting for something to happen, as in, "I waited for the bus."
• What would the speaker be waiting for? The Second Coming of Jesus? The end of history? We don't know because the poem only suggests this meaning oh-so-vaguely.
• The word "post" here just means "to travel quickly." That's why the mail is often referred to as the "post," because you're supposed to travel quickly to deliver it.
• The poem ends with a vindication of the speaker's passivity, which has been forced on him by his blindness.

Vision, Light, and Darkness

Symbol Analysis

This poem is sometimes called "On His Blindness," but the speaker might respond, "Blindness? What blindness? I'm not the one who's blind. It's the world that has run out of light." This argument is like saying that you aren't really running – it's the world that is rolling beneath you like a treadmill. As you can see, Milton uses complicated wordplay to describe why the speaker has a hard time serving God. His "blindness" is like a lamp that runs out of fuel, like the daylight that turns to night, and like a currency that hasn't been used to maximum effect.

• Line 1: Vision is not same thing as "light," although vision requires light. So, we can't just substitute one word for the other. Milton is using a metaphor to compare his vision to a light source that could run out, like an old-fashioned lamp that burns through its oil.
• Line 2: "Ere half my days" is a way of saying, "Before my life is through." But "days" also introduces the idea of daylight. The speaker's "days" are now more like nights. He uses another metaphor to compare his lack of vision to an imagined world that does not have light. The phrase "this dark world and wide" is also an example of alliteration.
• Line 7: The speaker compares God – again using metaphor – to a master who makes his servants work in darkness. He "denies" them light, which sounds heartless.

The Parable of the Talents

Symbol Analysis

The poem hinges on a pun on "talent" in the sense of "skill" and "talent" as a unit of monetary measurement in Biblical times. The parable of talents occurs in chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew, and it tells the story of two servants improving their own lot by increasing the bounty of their master. In the first section, the speaker compares God to the "lord" in the parable who goes away on a trip and returns to ask what his servants have done with their money. In the second section of the poem, "patience" explains that God is more like a king who does not need all his servants to actively work for him.

• Line 1: The word "spent" becomes a pun when we read it in light of the discussion of money and currency in the next few lines. The speaker's ability to see is like a currency, and he has unfortunately burned through it too soon. That "light" was supposed to last him all the way through his retirement!
• Lines 3-5: The word "Talent" has a double meaning, as described above. The whole Biblical parable about hiding the talent and not turning the master's currency into a profit is used as an extended metaphor in which God is compared to the lord, while the speaker is the third servant who has buried the money.
• Line 6: The word "account" is also a double-entendre that works on both sides of the extended metaphor. In one sense, "account" is a story of justification for how the speaker has used his time on earth. In another sense, the "account" is the amount of money the servant in the parable is able to show to his lord. The servant must give this account after his lord has "returned" from traveling.
• Lines 11-12: We think that the observation that God's "state is Kingly" is meant to contrast God with the lord from the parable.

Patience, Please

Symbol Analysis

"Patience" is an important virtue in Christianity. It allows people to work toward other "theological" virtues like hope and faith. When the speaker begins to question whether God might be kind of a cruel figure for demanding work from people who can't perform it, patience steps in to correct him. The twist, of course, is that the speaker must already have patience in order for the personified figure called "patience" to come on the scene.

• Line 7: The speaker is about to ask a rhetorical question about God's justice before patience interrupts him.
• Line 8: The virtue of patience is personified as "patience," the amazing advice giver. In the second half of the poem, patience replies to the speaker's question.
• Line 11: The metaphor in the first half of this line compares God's rule over men to the wooden yoke that guides farm animals.
• Lines 12-13: These lines present an image of servants rushing all over the world, by land and by sea, to serve God. These "servants" are Christian soldiers, merchants, politicians, clergy, etc. Lines 11-14 form an extended metaphor comparing service to God with service to the most powerful king in the world.
• Line 14: The word "wait" is a pun. It means "wait" in the sense that the speaker will wait until the end of his life to meet his ultimate fate, and also in the sense that a person "waits" on a more powerful person simply by standing there until he is needed.

When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness): Rhyme, Form & Meter

We’ll show you the poem’s blueprints, and we’ll listen for the music behind the words.

Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter

Milton loved the classics, and in the 17th century, "classic" meant anything associated with Ancient Greece or Rome. The heart of the Roman Empire was located in what is now modern-day Italy, and the sonnet was invented in Italy, so it was not a surprise that Milton would favor the original Italian form of the sonnet. This form is divided up into two sections, one with eight lines and one with six. Shakespeare, on the other hand, used a sonnet form that ended with a rhyming two-line couplet. The Italian sonnet form was made popular by the Italian poet Petrarch, who was to the literary Renaissance what The Temptations were to Motown.

The rhyme scheme of this sonnet is ABBAABBAC CDECDE. So, you can see that lines 1, 4, 5, and 8 all rhyme with each other. Unlike a classic Italian sonnet, "When I consider how my light is spent" does not divide cleanly into eight lines and six lines, however. The first section of the poem consists of the speaker trying to frame his foolish question, and the second consists of the response to the question by a figure named "patience." Most Italian sonnets have a sharp thematic turn or "volta" between the two sections, but in this poem the turn is a bit muddled between lines 8 and 9. If you think about it, the confusion makes perfect sense, as it conveys the awkwardness of someone (patience) interrupting someone else (the speaker) before the speaker can say something stupid.

The meter of the poem is classic iambic pentameter, with five iambs (an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable). Some of the lines do not fit the pattern exactly, but the pattern itself is clear:

"Doth God ex-act day-la-bor, light de-nied?"

Finally, this poem features a lot of enjambment, which is when one line runs over into the next without a pause. Just check out the end of each line, and you'll find that over half lack punctuation markers like periods or semi-colons.

Speaker Point of View

Who is the speaker, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

Though the speaker may be seething with frustration and even anger at God, he knows that he must tread very carefully if he wants to express himself. He has the skills and intelligence to do great things out in the world, but he has been tripped up by a seemingly trivial problem: his light has run out. Unfortunately, this unlucky event throws a big wrench in his plans to be useful. The speaker imagines that he could have become a famous politician or even, say, the author of one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. (Cough, cough). But now he can't possibly do any of that, right? (Cough, cough, cough.) He's a hard worker, and he can't just sit still! Can he?

You get the impression from reading the first section of the poem that the speaker just wants to shout, "You can't seriously expect me to do my Christian duty without vision. This is a joke, right?" Fortunately, the speaker has a little guy in his shirt pocket named "patience," capable of popping out and delivering a pep talk whenever it looks like the speaker is about to lose his cool. The important thing to remember is that "patience" belongs to the speaker.

Finally, we can see why the speaker thinks he would be so useful to God and to society: he is incredibly smart. With his ability to pack complicated arguments into a few brief lines, he would make an amazing lawyer. Also, he probably knows the Gospels inside and out because the "Parable of the Talents" is one of the least frequently quoted stories from the New Testament. On the other hand, the speaker still has "half [his] days" left to live, so maybe, just maybe, he'll still get around to doing great things.

When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness) Setting

Where It All Goes Down

The poem reminds us of those scenes from horror movies where the hero is walking through some dark and dangerous place – chased by monsters or something – and his flashlight/torch/lamp suddenly flickers and goes out. You hear heavy breathing and…what's that?! Did you hear a branch break?!

OK, the speaker is not in mortal danger, but he feels like his soul is endangered. He is left to navigate a "dark" and "wide" world without his vision. What's more, his demanding "Maker" has gone on a trip, and he worries he will be cast into further darkness if he can't make use of his "Talent." That "Talent" is buried deep within him, like a gold coin that has been thrown in a hole and covered up with soil.

In the second half of the poem, "patience" presents a different view of the world. In this view, the world is a huge kingdom with thousands and thousands of servants working to achieve God's will. Some of them speed from continent to continent like the characters in an Indiana Jones movie. Others just stand around until the king calls for them.

Sound Check

Read this poem aloud. What do you hear?

If you ever wanted to know what walking on eggshells sounded like in a poem, this sonnet is a prime example. The speaker buries the climax of the first part of the poem – the question of whether God demands "day-labour, light denied" – inside all these other delicate expressions of why light is so important to him. The poem has a lot of short phrases separated by commas and which seemingly bring us further and further from the point, as if Milton is worried that the whole sonnet might crack open into a steaming mass of resentment. It's like if you had a classmate who said, "When I think about how my pencil just broke, I can't finish my math problem, and I like math so much, but you really need an eraser to do it, or else you might be stuck with a wrong answer, which would lead to a bad grade; 'Can I borrow a pencil?' I would want to ask you." Just ask for the darned pencil already!

However, when we consider that the speaker is about to talk to God, we can understand his desire to be cautious. The decision to questioning God's judgment is not to be taken lightly. The speaker is so cautious that he says, "I fondly ask" after he asks the question, which serves to take the sting of arrogance and insubordination out of it. Put another way, the time it takes you as reader to figure out what the speaker is trying to get across lessens the direct force of his statements.

"Patience," by contrast, is more direct. It uses shorter, more declarative sentences like, "His state is kingly." Because they are making complex arguments, both the speaker and "patience" use frequent enjambment, where one lines carries over into the next without a pause. This gives the poem a prose-like and slightly evasive sound (the eggshell thing, again). The entire poem builds to the final line, which does not carry over from the previous line and sounds remarkably clear and straightforward: "They also serve who only stand and wait." And we breathe a sigh of relief that the speaker has managed to hold things together until the end.

What’s Up With the Title?

This sonnet first appeared in Milton's 1673 collection of Poems simply as the nineteenth sonnet in the collection, or Sonnet XIX. Many readers, including us, refer to it by the first line, "When I consider how my light is spent." Identifying a poem by the first line is standard practice in the poetry world.

But, many more readers refer to the poem as, "On His Blindness." The problem with this title is that it didn't come from Milton. It was given almost a hundred years later by Bishop Newton, a writer and clergyman (source). Now, almost everyone agrees that the poem is most likely about Milton's blindness, but Milton never says so up front, leaving the door open for some interesting ambiguity. If Milton had wanted to say, "Hey, guys, this poem is about my blindness!" he could easily have done so. Newton's invented title changes the way you read the poem, which is why we prefer to use the first line of the poem.

John Milton’s Calling Card

What is the poet’s signature style?

"Light" in Darkness

Some critics think that Milton's blindness gave him an uncanny ability to depict light, darkness, and shadow. This sonnet offers pretty strong evidence for that claim. The central extended metaphor combines the concepts of light and money into symbolism as dense as seven-layer cake. Light and darkness interact in strange ways in Milton's poems. One of the most famous sections in Paradise Lost describes the interior of Hell as having:

No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,

"Darkness visible." Wow. Milton's blindness proved to him that one can "see" even without light. We should also point out that the distinction between light and darkness is central to Christian theology.

Tough-O-Meter

We’ve got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you’ll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)

(7) Snow Line

For a short, 14-line sonnet, this poem is pretty hard. That's Milton for you. Few poets display so much religious and literary knowledge as Mr. Milton, and this poem is no exception. Most people today don't memorize the Gospels like they did back in 17th-century England, but if you don't know the "Parable of the Talents" from Matthew 25, you miss a lot of the context for the poem's symbolism. It would be like reading a poem about "The Rumble in the Jungle" if you had never heard of the legendary boxers Mohammed Ali and George Foreman. Also, there are a lot of double-entendres in this sonnet, and some words like "fondly" have unexpected meanings. In short, this is a poem where Shmoop makes an excellent Sherpa to take you to the top of the mountain. The view is unquestionably worth it.

When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness) Theme of Guilt and Blame

The speaker's mind is a big ball of guilt and confusion. He takes pride in his vast intelligence, but worries that he failed to use his "light" when he had it. You can imagine him saying, "How could I have known my vision was going to run out?!" His soul "bends" toward service of God like a flower bends toward the sun, but he is no longer fit for the kinds of intensive work that he might have done. He hopes that God does not blame him like the angry lord from the "Parable of the Talents" in the Bible.

When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness) Theme of Dreams, Hopes, and Plans

Before going blind, the speaker has high hopes for what he might accomplish in the future. He says he would have been a supremely useful servant of God. But we can't know if his motives are truly selfless, or if he is an ambitious guy who now struggles to come to terms with a personal upheaval. As he looks to the future, he compares his situation to the third servant from the New Testament "Parable of the Talents" in Matthew 25. Because he has not increased his master's wealth, this servant is cast into the darkness. Considering that the speaker already feels he lives in the darkness, what further punishment does he expect? At the end of the poem, patience gives him a new plan: he should wait until God calls on him to serve

When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness) Theme of Principles

We've all heard the homespun wisdom "Patience is a virtue," which sounds almost mystical but is really like saying, "Blue is a color." The more interesting question is, what's a virtue? A virtue is a character trait that helps you achieve some desired good or outcome. Virtues are central to Christian theology. The speaker desires to serve God, but his impatience and sense of wounded pride threaten to get in his way by leading him to rashly criticize his "Maker." The virtue of patience helps him to remember that it's not all about him. Just because he thinks he has something to offer doesn't mean that God needs him to act right away.

When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness) Theme of Religion

John Milton was a Puritan who supported Oliver Cromwell's republican commonwealth after the execution of King Charles I of England. During this period, politics and religion were tied closely together, so that being "useful" to the government meant being "useful" to God, at least for Milton. The poem displays Milton's encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible but also his reforming instincts. Milton is not afraid to challenge the supposed moral of the New Testament "Parable of the Talents" by pointing out the difference between God and the lord from the story. The sonnet gives expression to intense religious emotions, but its rational and rhetorical qualities are equally important.

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Grace Nichols The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping

The Guyanese-born poet Grace Nichols is among a growing network of Afra-Caribbean writers who
articulate their unique heritage of double colonization as women in a postcolonial community. Like Faybiene above, these women write in part to reject the social and mythological roles within which women in the Caribbean have long been confined, and in so doing to help loosen the sexual and economic constraints of women in their communities. As Faybiene insists, "When I lay sleeping in your rib / You called me no name // I am that I am"; these writers claim the Adamic role by naming themselves powerfully, attempting to crack the silence with which they have worn the names imposed by others. Moreover, as Faybiene names herself in words that echo the Judeo-Christian Yahweh's "I am who am," Afra-Caribbean poets may reforge myths that uncover the power of black women as queens, leaders, or goddesses. The poet and essayist Marlene Nourbese Philip emphasizes the special necessity of this project for the black female: "It is imperative that our writing begin to recreate our histories and our myths, as well as integrate that most painful of experiences - loss of our history and our world."(1) Grace Nichols uses such revisionary mythopoesis in her volume The Fat Black Woman's Poems to engender a new heroine, a woman who revises the esthetic of female beauty, challenges oppressive societal forces, and emerges as a powerful queen, founder, or goddess Like many Afra-Caribbean writers, Nichols infuses her poetry with the spiritual energy of the tradition of women before her, a tradition that has little written record. For although the strength of foremothers who were cultural protectors, social leaders, and family heads has recently been more widely examined (for example, by studies such as the 1995 Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective), it is a strength that has often been strategically hidden by women themselves or obscured by others who fear it. 

The Caribbean offers a particular challenge to the fashioner of a women's mythology. As Carol Boyce Davies reports, "In at least three categories of the earliest material available - the proverb, the folktale, and the major song form, the calypso(2) - woman's image is almost uniformly negative."(3) She cites a long list of images that demean women: "witch-spouses, gullible wives, dumb wives, unfaithful wives, wicked mothers, murderous mothers, cruel old women (hags, sorceresses, witches, soucoyants), vulnerable daughters, and almost no heroic women."(4) Strong women have thus been cast as evil or cruel, as the Obeah woman, for instance, often is. Until lately the one major exception to the negative image of women seems to be the often-invoked folk heroine, Grandy Nanny of the Maroons, called a "mytho/legendary ancestress"(5) and credited as being an excellent Obeah woman, healer, and military leader of a group of free blacks. Nanny's story begins with her importation to Jamaica from Africa as a slave, at which point she "rebelled and fled to the mountains from where she waged war against the British."(6) Lucille Mathurin Mair asserts that written records verify Nanny's status as a leader in the 1730s who made a reluctant peace in 1740 and got a patent in 1741 for land which her people still inhabit.(7) 

Though the heritage of this single female leader is necessarily limited, Grandy Nanny provides a valuable figure of resistance for the Afra-Caribbean writer who looks for mythological or literary models. Her myth is even more useful and poignant, perhaps, if we examine Nanny not only as a political rebel but also as a woman refusing to allow the colonization of her body through slavery and its attendant horrors of physical brutality and rape. Although Nanny is figured more often as a (grand)motherly (and hence stereotypically asexual) woman, contemporary knowledge exposes what was long recognized by victims and survivors: rape is not a violation reserved for the young and "sexy" woman only. The colonized woman's body is itself seen as a new world to be penetrated and harvested for sexual satisfaction and for the economic gain of children born into slavery. Nanny's escape is therefore not only a political rebellion but a flight to personal safety and control of her own body. In fact, her supernatural abilities are intimately tied to her body; it is said of Nanny that she could attract the bullets of the white soldiers to her buttocks where they were caught and rendered harmless!(8) She thus emerges as a precursor to the mythological woman (re)imagined by Nichols, who takes what Nourbese Philip has called "the inner space," the vulnerable female body, into ideological battle.(9) The body taken into battle may be fully loaded, to pun on that word, for, as Kadiatu Kanneh expresses it, "What is complicated is the simultaneity of suffering and power, marginalisation and threat, submission and narcissism, which accrue to Black and women's bodies and their representation in racist cultures."(10) As Nichols also realizes, the body is a site on which numerous linguistic and social constructions place their foundations. 

With the radical body of Nanny as a precursor, Grace Nichols turns to the process of mythopoesis to create another similarly vital and rebellious woman in her poetry, a woman who can stand alongside Nanny as founding mother. I will examine here the first section of Nichols's volume The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984), in which the title character is metamorphosed from a figure of ridicule or a representative of the Jemima stereotype into a self-celebrating quasi-goddess. Nichols's powerful writing has received little critical attention, and most has concentrated on her volume i is a long memoried woman, winner of the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In that volume Nichols leads the reader through an archetypal Afra-Caribbean woman's history, from African to slave and mother to revolutionary victor, painting the portrait of a woman who suffers, dreams, works, loves, triumphs, and ultimately gains "the power to be what I am / a woman / charting my own futures."(11) As Gabriele Griffin says of that volume, "Nichols's Black woman uses her body, her voice, her song to maintain her sense of selfhood, to support others and to subvert the structures that oppress her."(12) 

While the same could be said of the poet's next volume, the verses collected in The Fat Black Woman's Poems take on a more contemporary frame and also assume a certain playfulness in their remythologizing, what Nichols describes as "a sheer sense of fun, of having the fat black woman doing exactly as she pleases . . . taking a satirical, tongue-in-cheek look at the world."(13) As the title announces, it is a book in which the racialized and "weighed" body is of foremost importance. Recuperating the body signals as well the recuperation of identity; as Bryan Turner explains, "The body is an important surface on which the marks of social status, family position, tribal affiliation, age, gender, and religious condition can easily and publicly be displayed."(14) Nichols redefines the standards of beauty which exclude the fat black woman and, perhaps most radically, posits the fat black woman as herself a sort of colonizer, a founding mother of a new civilization, a new Eve, and even a creator-goddess, at the close of this sequence.

شرح اخر                                         

Grace Nichols, ‘The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping’

Shopping in London winter
is a real drag for the fat black woman
going from store to store
in search of accommodating clothes
and de weather so cold
Look at the frozen thin mannequins
fixing her with grin
and de pretty face salesgals
exchanging slimming glances
thinking she don’t notice
Lord is aggravating
Nothing soft and bright and billowing
to flow like breezy sunlight
when she walking
The fat black woman curses in Swahili/Yoruba
and nation language under her breathing
all this journeying and journeying
The fat black woman could only conclude
that when it come to fashion
the choice is lean
Nothing much beyond size 14

Analysis:

It seems like that our poet is using her sarcastic sense of humour to complain about the difficulties in finding clothes of her size in cold winter in London.  However, it is clear that London does not sell clothes of her size although she is a British.  Moreover, sales girls are making fun of her appearance. 

Language:

Nichols’ language is colloquial which sounds like a daily conversation.  It is also dramatic and jaunty which is close to Stevie Smith’s ‘the jungle husband’.  She deliberately typed ‘de’ instead ‘the’, labelled her identity (diction).

Techniques:

Rhyming: the frequent use of whispering, sibilant words like ‘sh’, ‘s’ created an unpleasant atmosphere and produced a reflectively regretful tone that almost masks the anger.

Also, the repeated use of ‘ing’, ‘in’, ‘b’ effectively conveyed her mind state.  Angry but she is trying to put it under the control.  Negative feelings come from prejudice and discrimination in terms of sizes, cold weather and pretty face salesgals’ slimming glances but she is still trying to ignore and stay positive.

Repetition:

Fat black woman appeared 3 times in this poem.  Her image is impressive, as I would like to think that she represents black women in the UK.

'Store to store’ is responding to ‘journeying to journeying’, effectively delivering the sad truth is that she lives in London but it does not sell clothes of her size.  In a cold winter, she must have worn a lot in order to keep warm but as stores don’t have her size, her clothes may look outdated and perhaps shabby.  The reality made her feel sick, exhausted and tired.

Journeying to journeying may offer a double meaning which renders the fact that racial prejudice and discrimination has existed in London for a long time, and ridiculously, this journey has no end. 

Her conclusion is polite and sarcastic, open to multiple interpretations.  Of course, poet just chose fashion as a window to articulate discrimination but it is not limited to fashion…

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