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    A Study Guide for John Milton's "How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet VII)"
    A Study Guide for John Milton's "How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet VII)"
    A Study Guide for John Milton's "How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet VII)"
    Ebook35 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for John Milton's "How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet VII)"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for John Milton's "How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet VII)," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535825085
    A Study Guide for John Milton's "How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet VII)"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for John Milton's "How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet VII)" - Gale

      13

      How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth (Sonnet 7)

      John Milton

      1645

      Introduction

      John Milton wrote during a time of political transitions and religious conflict in England. His essays, pamphlets, and poetry elucidate his views on contemporary political and religious matters, but many of his works are also intensely personal. Milton's Sonnet 7, sometimes referred to by its first line, How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth, focuses on his sense of time's passage and his trajectory toward his calling in life. Milton's studies were preparing him for life as an Anglican priest, a career he ultimately rejected, but he also pursued a vocation as a writer during his time at Christ's College, Cambridge University. His faith often informed his work, and by the 1640s, Milton had begun to sympathize with the Puritan cause of returning Anglicanism to its Protestant roots and eliminating all vestiges of Roman Catholicism from the religion. In Sonnet 7, Milton suggests that despite the youthful appearance he possesses in his early twenties, he nevertheless maintains an awareness of the development of his inner sense of maturity. Throughout the first eight lines of the sonnet, the octave, Milton employs an extended metaphor of time as a thief. In the last six lines of the sonnet, the sestet, Milton makes repeated reference to his destiny and the role of God's will in his ability to fulfill his ambitions.

      While scholars speculate that Sonnet 7 was written in the early 1630s, given that Milton was born in 1608 and the poem references his twentythird year, the poem was not published until 1645, when it was collected in the volume Poems of Mr. John Milton. The poem is available in The Annotated Milton: Complete English Poems (1999), edited by Burton Raffel.

      Author Biography

      Milton was born on December 9, in 1608, in London, to parents John Milton Sr. and Sara Jeffey Milton. While at least three of the Milton's siblings are known to have died in infancy or early childhood,

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