That Milton’s Sonnet XIX is now generally regarded as his contemplation over the implications of his blindness is less about the poem itself—Milton never actually uses the word “blind” or “vision” and composed the poem more than decade after his vision loss—and more about the efforts of a well-intentioned but misdirected editor of what became a standard folio of Milton’s poems published nearly a century after his death who opted to hang the title “On His Blindness” on the sonnet. The title stuck and in turn generated centuries of readings that explored the poem as an early defense of the abilities of the disabled in its suggestion that the disabled, even though limited in what they can do, nevertheless serve God in this life of non-doing, to paraphrase the much celebrated and oft-quoted closing line about just standing around and waiting.

Apart from the troubling logic that apparently assumes the blind do nothing but stand around waiting (ironic given that Milton himself would produce his greatest and most enduring works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, long after he had lost his vision), the reading of the poem as a rueful look at the anxieties of a major poet who must now abandon that craft because his blindness actually flies in the face of Milton’s own biography.