Milton's sonnet for Catherine Thomson begins from a plain fact. The title calls her his "Christian Friend" and fixes her death at 16 December 1646. Beyond that, the poem tells us little about her life and a great deal about what Milton believes her life amounted to. His central idea is that goodness does not die with the body. Her faith and love ripen her soul, her deeds follow her upward, and in heaven they speak for her.
The opening quatrain makes death sound like the end of a growing season. Faith and Love have "ripened thy just soul", as if it were fruit ready to be picked, and "just" here means righteous. She does not struggle or get dragged away. She "Meekly" resigns "this earthly load", which suggests someone putting down a heavy bag, or giving up an office she has filled well. Then comes the sharpest line: "Of death, called life, which us from life doth sever." Milton turns the usual meaning upside down. Earthly existence is the real "death", and what we call dying is the way into true life. Even the grammar of the line is cut in two by the repeated word "life", which suits a line about severing.
The rhyme scheme supports this. The octave follows the Petrarchan pattern *abba abba*, so the same sounds keep returning. Those sounds are *never*, *sever*, *endeavour* and *ever*. The first line says Faith and Love parted from her "never", and the eighth sends her deeds up to joy "for ever". Between them sits "sever", the one word that means separation, and it is outnumbered by the others. The sestet then switches to an alternating *cdcdcd*, and its rhymes (*best*, *drest*, *rest*) settle toward the word "rest", which the poem has been heading for.
Milton also plays with where a sonnet normally turns. The break after line 8 would usually bring a change of direction, but here the thought carries straight over it. The octave ends with her works that "Followed thee up", and line 9 picks up with "Love led them on." The whole sestet is then one long sentence. It rushes forward like the flight it describes and stops only at the last line.
The imagery in that sestet is the poem's boldest move. Her "works, and alms, and all thy good endeavour" are first said not to have "stayed behind" or been "trod" in the grave. Then they become people. Faith carries a "golden rod" and points the way, and Love leads. Faith is called their "handmaids" and dresses them in "purple beams / And azure wings". The colours are those of royalty and sky, and "beams" makes the clothing out of light. A list of good deeds turns into a procession of winged attendants. It is a strangely vivid picture for something as ordinary as charity.
Then the setting shifts to a courtroom. The deeds "speak the truth of thee on glorious themes / Before the Judge", so they act as witnesses for the defence. The idea recalls the biblical line that the works of the faithful dead "follow them", though the sonnet gives that idea its own shape. Her virtue does not need to be argued for, because it can testify for itself. The Judge's verdict is gentle: he bids her "rest, / And drink thy fill of pure immortal streams." After the "load" of the first quatrain, the last line offers refreshment. It is made almost entirely of one-syllable words, which slows the voice to a drinker's pace.
The sonnet matters because it is both an elegy and an argument. It gives a private farewell the order of a short theological case, and it lets the dead woman be praised for what she did, for her alms and her good endeavour, and not for any rank or title. It also shows Milton, the poet of *Paradise Lost*, working on a very small scale. In fourteen lines he builds a paradox, a procession and a trial, and ends on a calm that the reader feels is earned.