For the brilliant students of ENG 341
To date online as a disabled gay man means disclosing your limp to someone who likely has more than a soupçon of concern for fitness. At least, it means doing so eventually. One’s profile could cop to using a cane and brace, of course, but mine doesn’t, for better and for worse. That’s because coming out in these circumstances can engender its own sort of intolerance. It must therefore be done well: nothing less than the relationship’s future—whether there will be one in the first place—turns on the words you choose.
But what does coming out as disabled well mean to begin with? Most recently—in my conversations with a contoured volleyball player we’ll call J.—it involved the following text on the morning of our first date: “Also, just fyi, I walk with a bit of a limp (from an accident a while back)—and can occasionally be a tad wobbly—which isn’t an issue—I’m active, enjoy walking, etc.—but don’t want to catch you off guard lol. Hope that’s okay. I think I did mention I had an accident a decade ago.” His response was par for the course, “Aww I’m sorry”—grating, sure, but there’s no handbook for coming back from such a revelation, at least not in a world where the assumption of a thirty-one-year-old gay man is that he’s able of life and limb. His riposte, then: “No I don’t recall you mentioning it.” The simple declarative was a savvy rhetorical move, for it admitted to the possibility of missing something while saving most of the accusation for me.
Meanwhile, I not only toed the disability-studies line—my life isn’t all tears and tragedy—but kept things bright and breezy, too: “Nothing to be sorry about!” I emphasized, hoping the exuberant punctuation would evoke a picture of vivacious aplomb. My hopes, however, were dashed—by a staggeringly straightforward question, the last five words he’d text me, as it happened: “Is it something that’s permanent.” “Yeah,” I replied, realizing this wasn’t a good direction—not just for the lack of a question mark—before surrendering to mitigation one last time. “But I’m pretty active haha.” He sent back the sad emoji with a single tear. And I waited, thinking something else would come. Nothing did. I canceled the date.
*
Clearly, I had not disclosed my disability well after all: not just for the reaction it provoked—we can chalk this much up to obvious ableism—but for the way I handled my entire coming out. As the queer-coded term suggests, disability disclosure often involves what Andrew Leland has stylishly described, in his brilliant memoir of blindness, as “risky self-exposure” (105). Leland’s talking of the decision to bring his white cane—once “folded and hidden”—out of its bag, an experience he can describe only with the “language and … framework” of gender, sexuality, and the LGBTQ rights movement. (Ellen Samuels is likewise poignant on this point.) Using my own cane similarly feels like confessing to an aspect of my being that shouldn’t be a surprise at all, except for the fact that—alongside heteronormative assumptions—ablebodiedness structures our world and conditions what we expect of others. As Leland puts it, then, “[d]isability, like homosexuality, carries a stigma.”
But what happens when these two stigmas collide? What happens when reclaiming one seems to further marginalize the other, or apparently compels the halting conditionals and qualifications I used to explain my form? These dynamics of disclosure are worth double-clicking on because they reveal complications that have gone mostly overlooked in discussions of disability dis/avowal so far.[1] They might also be important to literary interpretation—to understanding even paradigmatically canonical authors, like the one I’ll focus on shortly: the early modern English poet John Milton (1608-74).
For the moment, however, let’s translate these dynamics into readily evident terms: “though x, in fact y.” But also, “though y, in fact x.” That is, “though I am active, in fact I walk with a limp,” and then again, “though I walk with a limp, I am in fact active.”
This chiasmus (xyyx) verges on tautology and conveys a sense of desperation—to say nothing of insecurity. More technically, the device is described by the tastemaker of Elizabethan verse George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy (1589), like this: “Ye haue a figure which takes a couple of words to play with in a verse, and by making them to chaunge and shift one into others place they do very prettily exchange and shift the sence.” On which account, we might say I was trying to accomplish a bit of literary legerdemain: conflating the lameness of a limp with the lilt of activity, exercise, intrigue. Such conflation is the first discursive feature of disclosing disability as a young person in a world that hardly expects it, especially to someone in a community that values athleticism very much indeed. By conflation, though, I mean obfuscation, the kind of equivalency made by contriving the mirrored symmetry of two unlike things.
More telling still is the grammatical construction of my response: a doubled, repetitive, strangely paradoxical concession. That is, the kind of gesture typically introduced with an “although” or “even if”—what Puttenham glosses as paramologia, the figure of admittance. We should get his helpful definition in full:
The good Orator vseth a manner of speach in his perswasion and is when all that should seeme to make against him being spoken by th’other side, he will first admit it, and in th’end auoid all for his better aduantage, and this figure is much vsed by our English pleaders in the Starchamber and Chancery, which they call to confesse and auoid, if it be in case of crime or iniury, and is a very good way. For when the matter is so plaine that it cannot be denied or trauersed, it is good that it be iustified by confessall and auoidance.
In full because much of this seems oddly prescient in the context of conversing with J.: the preemptive strategy of my language, its subtle persuasion, the attempt at building goodwill, the sense that what I’m conceding should be “confesse[d]” so as to be “avoid[ed],” and perhaps most of all, the evocation of a litigious context. We were in fact litigating something over text, the issue of whether we might eventually be lovers, even boyfriends, to which end I knew something obvious that would hurt my cause and decided to get out in front of it.
In short: I was trying to spin the matter positively by occupying two mutually exclusive conditions: lame and active. (I guessed he’d imagine them as oppositions given all those who had done so before.) But J. wasn’t buying my reconfiguration, and I hadn’t sold it well. For by conceding both my lameness and my vivacity, I’d left myself with nothing more to claim.
*
Even so, could this sort of rhetorical maneuver ever be generative in defter hands that could elevate it to the level of an actual poetics? More audaciously still, if paradox—as the New Critic Cleanth Brooks once put it—is the essential language of poetic discourse, might the kind of concessive paradox pervading (my) crip experience define a crip poetics as well (3)? Could it even suggest an alliance of literariness and disabled reality that’s been underrated in conversations among theorists of disability and literature alike? (These questions are worth asking, since we’re still reticent to speak of “crip literature” as we do its queer counterpart, and since discussion of disability in verse lags behind that of nonnormative bodyminds in prose.)[2]
To all three queries, the answer is yes. At least, that’s what the example of John Milton’s sonnet 22, “Cyriack, This Three Years’ Day These Eyes,” suggests. It might not, at first blush, seem an auspicious test case. Even some committed Miltonists have suggested it’s possibly dull, likely uninteresting, warped by one-note triumphalism and soporific self-congratulation. But this means that if a crip poetics of paradoxical concession is found even here—and if it quickens the poem in unexpectedly energizing ways—we’ll know we’re onto something. This, then, is the entire fourteen lines:
Cyriack, this three years’ day these eyes, though clear
To outward view of blemish or of spot,
Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun or moon or star throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not
Against Heav’n’s hand or will, not bate a jot
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty’s defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world’s vain mask
Content, though blind, had I no better guide.
Before going any further, we should note that at a time when many of Milton’s political opponents were claiming his blindness was proof of divine punishment for the poet’s vehemently antimonarchical politics, Milton’s emphasis on naturalism packs an anti-ableist wallop.[3] Here, there’s no bolt of lordly lightning on the way to Damascus—only a slow attenuation, the “forget[ting]” of function, eyes “overplied,” overworked and weary. No less noteworthy is Milton’s first crack at reconciling one experience of disability—“Nor to their idle orbs doth sigh appear / of sun or moon or star throughout the year, / Or man or woman”—with the device of the poetic catalogue. Breathlessly, the lines collapse any coherent, linear sense of temporality—a point my students in a Renaissance disability seminar recently stressed. They read this moment as an early telegraph of crip time that insists also on what Alison Kafer has called crip futurity: the continuation of disability toward a distant temporal horizon in the face of ableist resistance. The second of the poem’s voltas (or turns)—one more than it should have—likewise impels us to take note of the phrase “bear up and steer / Right onward,” how it responds to a complex nexus of cultural attitudes toward blindness from Milton’s past and present alike, as the scholar Teri Fickling brilliantly argues in a forthcoming volume I’ve co-edited.
The point for now is to reiterate—as Fickling has shown, along with Amrita Dhar on “blind language” and Angelica Duran on Milton’s reinvention of the blind bard motif—that a great deal more is happening in this sonnet than has often been realized, and to make a claim for its importance as a site of crip poetics.
Is it paradoxically concessive, however? Yes, though in surprising, unpredictable ways, which we’ll discover is exactly the point: to lean into these unpredictabilities of, literary and somatic, form.
To do so, let’s zero in on two moments in Sonnet 22, the first and final lines: “Cyriack, this three years’ day these eyes, though clear” (1); and “Content though blind, had I no better guide” (14). The verbal connective tissue that gives the poem a sense of coherence is “though,” which, not coincidentally, is found nowhere else in Milton’s sonnets. The conjunction is embedded within a chiastic sonic pattern that turns on the palatal (hard) c sound. In other words, the last two words of the first line, “though clear,” are mirrored and echoed in the first two of the last line: “Content though” (my emphasis). Altogether, the structure evokes someone who’s figuring out what exactly his disability means, how he wants to talk about it, and why he needs to broach its realities with others in the first place. His figuring goes something like this: concession + assertion | assertion + concession. More simply put: though clear, his eyes are blind; he’s content, though blind.
The first time around, Milton seems to be apologizing for the obvious appearance of ability when the truth is that he’s disabled. The second time, he’s apparently saying sorry for this truth—the fact of blindness, which would lead someone to believe he’s hopelessly “bereft”—when in fact he’s “content.” In both cases, one reality contravenes another one. We’ve seen this logic before. Though I walk with a limp, I’m active; though I’m active, I walk with a limp. In the game of disability disclosure, you’re always apologizing for some misdirection or other.
Indeed, Milton’s sonnet performs a coming out. The whole text is addressed to his friend Cyriack Skinner.[4] This is no ornamental convention, argues J.E. Adams, who shows that the poem allows “Milton to at once pay tribute to guidance and implicitly offer it: as he recounts for Cyriack his own career, it becomes a pattern of virtuous human endeavor” (16). This also means that more than simply a singular, concrete friend, the figure of Cyriack works capaciously here. He’s not just a pupil but an auditor—not just a person in-the-know but someone who might need to be told of Milton’s particularities, too.
So the drama of this scene hinges on, as Adams puts it, “the contrast between inner reality (the realm of ‘conscience’ and ‘thought’) and ‘outward view.’” And, as I’d add, on the fact that neither “inner reality” nor “outward view” are quite commensurate to the lived realities of crip experience. These contingencies, after all, are paradoxical. They twist and torque “reality” and “view,” alike.
*
Does this mean that Sonnet 22 reverberates with self-defeating qualifications of what’s already been said, like my response to J.? Not quite. For Milton’s chiasmus of paradoxical concession—clear, bereft, content, blind—admits of another rhetorical complexity. Within its reversal is an alternating form of organization called synchysis. That is, cbcb. Milton would have known both figures, chiasmus and synchysis, from his grammar-school days—and from reading The Art of English Poesy himself. While interweaving them, he’s up to one last bit of verbal sorcery, which is to indulge an earlier, Elizabethan fondness for elaboration (periphrasis) only to winnow the verbiage down dramatically by the end. Which is to say, Milton culls “though clear / To outward view of blemish or of spot” so that it becomes the simple “Content,” and he leaves “Bereft of light their seeing have forgot” as the equally elegant “blind.” The subject of these phrases changes, too, from “eyes” in line 1 to the speaker himself (“me”) in line 13.
In other words, the real genius—we might want to say, paradox—of the poem is that even as Milton seems to be enfolding the entire lyric within the careful, possibly confining, parallelism of chiasmus, other structures of sense and speech—even ones that should be mutually exclusive—intervene. Their collaborative effect is to point us not to disabled, “bereft” eyes but to the disabled speaker himself. To a speaker who does what I could not do four-hundred years later: claim disability with pride.
This is no small thing to point out, in part because one of the most compelling assessments of this sonnet, by Anna K. Nardo, suggests that the poem has very little to do with individual identity at all: “[i]n a futile attempt to understand it in terms of his self-image,” the speaker “is tempted, as he was in Sonnet 19, by vanity, self-deception, pride, and finally complete self-reliance — each temptation leading to the next until he is rescued from spiritual blindness at the last minute” (153–54). I’ll readily acknowledge my respect for Nardo’s book on these poems but dissent from almost all of her local findings here—the characterization of “Sonnet 19,” for one, and the description of “spiritual blindness,” for another. The most important disagreement in this context, however, is my final premise that Milton never abandons his concern with image and representation. He never puts aside his anxiety for depicting himself to himself and to others. In the terms of contemporary disability life, he’s disclosing till the end.
Yet Milton’s is an odd kind of disclosure, one that ultimately shows the limits of the dis/ability binary that makes coming out a necessity in the first place. In this poem, both states bleed precariously into one another until it’s no longer clear for what—finally—the speaker must account. As such, Milton turns the very calculus of coming out on its head, to which end, the figure of synchysis (in Greek, confusion) is perfectly appropriate, as a stymieing of the abashed and apologetic equivalencies chiasmus might otherwise enforce. For even as Milton’s poem seems, symmetrically, to mirror the opposite terms of its beginning with two more at the end, its start and finish do not parallel each other, in rhythm, reference, or rhetorical heft. The result is that Sonnet 22 itself ends oddly, unsettlingly, to convey the oddness of being disabled in an able-bodied world, the strangeness of being so frequently read and misread by those for whom the speaker’s existence is disordering—his existence and the contrary, even paradoxical, signals it seems to transmit.
Adams offers one compelling account of this conclusion: “from past sorrow to enduring faith, the poem’s various movements unite and culminate in this majestically understated conclusion” (16). Various movements I accept; culminate, sure; but unite suggests a harmony that the profound imbalance we’ve just explored makes impossible. I’ve shown this imbalance (like the one my body often displays) to include, among much else, the stripping of periphrasis and expansion from the eyes to “me”; the invocation and then confusion of polarities of appearance and reality; and the contraction of three pentameter lines into three foreceful words. But we should also consider its larger implications. In short: within this imbalance the poem’s beauty—and really, its contribution to crip poetics—at last coheres. For it is only by way of this lopsided, contesting, perhaps even deforming palimpsest of rhetorical features that the sonnet discloses its fullest meaning: its acknowledgement of our desire for predictable embodiment only to acknowledge, in turn, something more significant still, that our movements and abilities are more unpredictable even than those who try to speak of them at first can know.
But while acknowledgment might be the speaker’s ultimate concern in Sonnet 22, paradoxical concession is crucial to the poem as a whole. It allows for the poem’s startling effects—and its relevance to crips even now. The reversal of “though clear, … content though” presages the very thing I tried to pull with J while indexing how the logics that structure my relationships, my very existence, have a backstory to which we must still attend.
At the same time, the synchysis of “clear bereft … content blind” pulls the rug out from under the tautology of this obfuscation. Which is all to say that the end of the poem returns to and revisits its beginning so that the start might be revised, grammatically, rhythmically, ethically. It’s the ethical bit that matters most of all: the idea that far from warranting the one-tear emoji, far from a feature of life to be rectified at long last, disability is key to the identity of the speaker, his quiddity even, and that of the poem itself.
*
I suggested before that attending to the paradoxes of disability disclosure might help us better understand crip poetics, one that takes disability seriously as an aesthetic and ethical resource, to borrow from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (“Conserving”). This would be a poetics of irony and ambivalence that elevates our paradoxically plural, particular, pervasive challenges into a literature that might usher us out of exile and into pride (as Eli Clare would say). On some days, at least.
On others, it’s enough that this poetics give us the “words with which to begin speaking about [our] own experience” (1), as the disabled poet Kenny Fries once put it. This is no modest thing.
The pressure to disclose in the first place may well be a function of an ableist world. But Milton shows us something of the way it might be turned to let pass a glimmering ray of formal splendor that shines, at last, into a beacon of possibility and panache. This beacon might have real anti-ableist voltage, too. In Staring, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson carefully describes how disability demands a narrative to quell the concerns of ableist onlookers, though the narrative they construct imposes an order to which crip particularities refuse, unwieldily, to conform. What then is a person to do? They might find a way to express this unruliness in language, using expected narratives to tell a new kind of story in, and of, strangely beautiful forms.
But perhaps I was too hard on myself before. Disclosure in the real world makes revision less plausible than repetition and anxious, pleading reversal. In such moments, to be aware of these structures of thought and language might well be enough: to know that, like chiasmus, scripts about the unsexiness of disabled bodies run deep; to know, too, that these are scripts made, ultimately, of words. Scripts that, as I’ve shown here, are organized into figures of speech and sense and sound, and that might be subverted by these means as well, microcosmically evidenced by the Miltonic drama of synchysis and chiasmus.
This drama, finally, is why the rhetorical particularities of crip poetics matter, not because we can always revise our disclosures in the moment but because we can revise them on the page, with language, to one another and to the world. Milton does this; so does Fries. And in their wake, there’s Emilia Nielsen, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Ilya Kaminsky, Stephen Kuusisto, Meg Day, Walela Nehanda, Rob Macaisa Colgate; the list goes wondrously on—as this fantastic hub on Disability Poetics, organized by Jennifer Bartlett and Sheila Black, reveals.
All of them use verse to “embod[y] a disability consciousness” in a “crip poetics” that “is informed by and contributes to disability culture,” in the words of Jim Ferris, a disabled poet himself.
It’s Ferris’s emphasis on graphic embodiment and culturally-shaped formation that are worth stressing most of all. Because it is from this perspective that I can most persuasively disavow myself of the charge of pedantry that might naturally follow from a piece on recondite rhetorical structures. It’s from this perspective that the technicalities of a chiasmus wherein synchysis and periphrasis, radical concision and deferred alliteration, reside are not just the musings of a spurned academic nor simply the instantiation of disability disclosure but a galvanizing glimpse of crip creativity, rarely loose-limbed yet linguistically alive.
Notes
[1] For the complexities of dis/avowing disability for queer people, see Kunzel and Hrynyk, whose focus is more conceptual than specifically rhetorical, as mine is. For the language of dis/avowal in an early modern context, see Hobgood (2).
[2] Cf. Hedva’s fascinating desire for “language–and by extension, political rhetoric–to contain paradox” (183). “No,” they quality, “I need it to contain paradox. This is because paradox exists, and I need language to reflect that.”
[3] For more on the imbrication of nation, liberty, and religion—which lies the heart of this poem—in Milton’s work, see Sauer’s superb article.
[4] For more on Milton’s self-representation, see Fallon’s fantastic book.
Works Cited
Adams, J. E. “‘Attend Me More Diligently’: Guidance and Friendship in Milton’s Sonnet 22.” Milton Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 1, 1984, pp. 13–17.
Dhar, Amrita. “Toward Blind Language: John Milton Writing, 1648–1656.” Milton Studies, vol. 60, no. 1–2, 2018, pp. 75–107.
Duran, Angelica. “The Blind Bard, According to John Milton and His Contemporaries.” Mosaic, vol. 46, no. 3, 2013, pp. 141–57.
Fallon, Stephen M. Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority. Ithaca, Cornell UP, 2007.
Fickling, Teri. “Blind Self-Governance in Milton’s ‘Cyriack, This Three Years’ Day These Eyes.’” Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment, and Care, edited by Angelica Duran and Pasquale Toscano, ch. 8, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, exp. 2026.
Fries, Kenny, ed. Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1997.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Case for Conserving Disability.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, vol. 9, 2012, pp. 339–355.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2009.
Hedva, Johanna. How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom. New York: Hillman Grad Books, 2024.
Hobgood, Allison P. Beholding Disability in Renaissance England. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 2021.
Hrynyk, Nicholas. “‘No Sorrow, No Pity’: Intersections of Disability, HIV/AIDS, and Gay Male Masculinity in the 1980s,” DSQ 41.2 (2021).
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 2013.
Kunzel, Regina. “The Rise of Gay Rights and Disavowal of Disability in the United States.” The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, edited by Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen, Oxford, Oxford UP, pp. 459–76.
Leland, Andrew. The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. New York: Penguin, 2023.
Nardo, Anna K. Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community. Lincoln, U of Nebraska P, 1979.
Samuels, Ellen.“The Social Model of Disability.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 4th ed., New York, Routledge, 2013, pp. 316–32.
Sauer, Elizabeth. “Milton’s ‘Of True Religion,’ Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty.” Milton Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–19.
Image
George Henry Boughton, The Meeting of Milton and Andrew Marvell, from “Hutchinson’s Story of the British Nation,” c. 1923. A group of friends gather around Milton, at the center, as Andrew Marvell–in Puritan garb–leans over to greet him.
