Booth, Stephen, and Jordan Flyer.  "Milton's 'How Soon Hath Time': A Colossus in a Cherrystone." Milton's Selected Poetry and Prose.  Ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt.  NY: Norton, 2011. 472-484.

In "Colossus," Booth and Flyer argue that Milton's Sonnet 7 is more complex and multivalent than commonly recognized, and that as a result we should appreciate Milton not only for his mastery of the epic and other "great" forms but also for his precision and intricacy in small and compact structures.  Milton's particular brilliance here, the authors show, is a kind of indeterminacy that represents human shortcoming and indecisiveness.  The way the lines are constructed, they suggest more meaning than a literal reading can support, a superfluity that indicates larger stages of meaning as well as a human inability to access and embody them.  In the end, the rhetoric of the last lines affirm, what matters most is a sense of assurance that meaning exists in God's eyes; those who enjoy such conviction, those who enjoy this sign of God's grace, can be assured a share in His good will.

Evidence #1: The author's look closely at the punctuation, syntax and pronouns of the last two lines.  Rhetorically they are clear and insistent, they show, but paraphrase is extremely difficult.  They offer a couple of conventional summaries, and show that neither is complete, or completely satisfying.  And this is exactly their sense of Milton's point: though human understanding is often faulty, if we attend to a "higher logic" (a typically Protestant sense of conviction, or "grace"), "all" will seem just as it should be, just as God intends.

Evidence #2: The authors bring in two NT parables--toiling in the vineyard and the talents--both to show another stage of meaning just beyond what the poem literally gets at and to ground its defeat of logic.  In the vineyard parable, those who are "late" are equal, in the eyes of God, to those who are early.  The reason isn't clear to us, but we are assured God awards intentions and commitments even more than what can be measured, quantified, and mapped out.

Opinion: This is an amazing close reading, almost ridiculously attuned to semantic multiplicity and possibility, but at the same time clear and repetitive in its point.  The authors communicate and experience of awe in reading the poem, since it opens up so many vistas but stays true to its fundamental belief in God's plan.  For all the poem's rhetorical assurance, though, I do wonder weather the Booth and Flyer downplay the anxiety evident.  The speaker is 23 and has achieved nothing, nor is he close to achieving anything.  Yes, this is as God wishes it, and early/late makes no difference to Him, but as late as line 12 there's still real ambivalence.  "Time" is an inferior leader--blind, deliberate, and insensitive; the will of Heaven is presumably not, but in this particular line both are said to lead, as if for all his faith the speaker still worries about his direction.  By this light, perhaps the superfluity in the poem is aspirational: what the poem would like to mean, would like to have happen, would like to believe, even as it's stuck in what can merely be stated.