In what we might call the public voice, poems speak what they assert are truths about the universe. In the personal voice, poems open the heart and show what’s inside. This distinction has very fuzzy edges, of course. There’s plenty of insight into the private mind of the poem’s speaker offered by poetry in a public voice. And there’s plenty of claims about reality that appear in the personal voice.

Still, at the center of each of the voices, the distinction is clear. W.H. Auden almost always speaks in the voice of public authority. Emily Dickinson almost never does. Samuel Johnson gives us almost no self-display. John of the Cross pulls out his heart and holds it in the air before us. 

At first glance — and second and third — John Milton (1608–1674) looks the epitome of public speakers. “Paradise Lost” makes the grandest of assertions about the structure of creation, the psychology of human beings, and the activities of heaven. Even a personal fact — the blindness that afflicted him in 1652 — becomes a meditation on the will of God, in “When I consider how my light is spent” (the c. 1655 sonnet that was the Sun’s Poem of the Day last December).

And “I did but prompt the age” (another of Milton’s sonnet as Poem of the Day) starts as contemplation of the author’s role in the battles that would kill the king, but the poem soon turns to a universal definition of liberty and insists on the moral character needed to maintain it: “For who loves that, must first be wise and good.”

In Sonnet 23, “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” a 1658 poem describing a dream vision of his deceased wife, we have among the most personal of Milton’s poems — today’s Poem of the Day, in honor of Milton’s December 9 birthday: “Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight / Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d / So clear as in no face with more delight.”

The mind that gave us “Paradise Lost,” however, is incapable of leaving it simply as that. The poem begins with the metaphor of Greek mythology’s Alcestis, who sacrificed herself for her husband Admetus and was brought back from the underworld by Hercules. The poem then offers another metaphorical description, as though she were washed clean and “Purification in the old Law did save,” drawing from the purifications after childbirth in Leviticus 12. And next the poem moves to describing her as “vested all in white, pure as her mind.”

This is the progression of Milton’s understanding of the history of thought about salvation: the ancient pagan sense, surpassed by the Old Testament sense, surpassed by the Christian revelation. And yet, the poem returns in its concluding lines to the personal description of the visual dream in his time of blindness: “But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d, / I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

Sonnet 23: Methought I saw my late espoused saint
by John Milton

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
       Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
       Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
       Rescu’d from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash’d from spot of child-bed taint
       Purification in the old Law did save,
       And such as yet once more I trust to have
       Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
       Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight
       Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d
So clear as in no face with more delight.
       But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d,
       I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.