London, 1802
William Wordsworth · 1802 · Petrarchan sonnet
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English duty Of happiness; we are selfish men; O raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on the common way In cheerfulness; a virgin among men.
Meaning
A fourteen-line summons: Wordsworth calls a dead poet back to life because the country he loved has gone spiritually stagnant, greedy and small.
Analysis
The address is not nostalgia but emergency. 'Thou shouldst be living at this hour' is a complaint about the present disguised as a wish for the past. The dead poet is invoked precisely because the living ones will not do.
Wordsworth indicts every institution at once with a four-item list — 'altar, sword, and pen' (church, military, press) — plus the domestic sphere of 'hall and bower'. The sentence accusing England of selfishness arrives in the octave, which in a Petrarchan sonnet is where the problem belongs; the sestet then turns entirely to Milton's character.
The comparison to a star — 'dwelt apart' — is complex praise. Milton is held up as separate from his society, yet the octave has just accused modern men of selfishness. The poem quietly argues that independence from the crowd is the source of public virtue, not a retreat from it.
Craft notes for your own writing
- Address someone who cannot answer; the one-sidedness creates urgency.
- List institutions, not individuals, to indict a whole culture in four words.
- Split your poem so the octave diagnoses and the sestet describes the cure.