Samson Agonistes

Overview

Samson Agonistes is about eighteen hundred lines, roughly eighty pages, and Milton prefaces it with a short essay insisting that it was never meant to be acted. Tragedy, he says, is the gravest and most profitable of poems, and he is writing in the manner of the ancients, not of the modern stage, which he considered corrupted by comic relief and spectacle. The Greek in the title means the contender or the one in the contest.

The form is genuinely Greek. There is one place, the prison yard at Gaza. The action occupies part of one day. Nothing violent happens in view; the catastrophe is reported by a messenger. A chorus, here the men of Samson’s own tribe of Dan, comments between episodes. And the structure is a sequence of visitors, each of whom tests the hero in a different way, which is the shape of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and of Oedipus at Colonus.

The verse is the other thing to notice. The dialogue is blank verse, more broken and speech-like than in Paradise Lost. The choral odes are something Milton invented for this poem: lines of wildly varying length, mostly unrhymed with occasional rhymes falling where you do not expect them, which he defends in the preface as an imitation of Greek practice. Nobody wrote English like that again until the twentieth century.

The story comes from the last chapters of the Book of Judges. Milton assumes you know it.

What happens

Samson is led out of the prison house on a festival day of Dagon and left to rest. His opening speech establishes everything: he was set apart before birth, promised as Israel’s deliverer, given more than human strength, and he is now a slave turning a mill. He does not blame God. He blames himself for telling a woman a secret that was not his to tell, and he dwells with terrible particularity on the blindness, which he says is worse than chains because it makes him less than a man while leaving him alive.

The chorus of Danites arrives and can find nothing useful to say. They are kind, they are shocked at his condition, and they keep drifting toward general observations about the ways of God to men.

Manoa, his father, comes with a plan. He has been negotiating with the Philistine lords and hopes to buy his son’s release and take him home to be cared for. Samson refuses to want it. He would rather die at the mill than be kept as an object of pity, and he tells his father that ransom would only prolong a uselessness.

Dalila comes next, and the scene is the most argued-over in the play. She approaches in tears with a series of defences: that she acted from love and wanted to keep him, that she was pressed by the magistrates and priests of her country, that patriotism excused her, and finally that she will be honoured in Philistia for what she did. She offers to nurse him at home. Samson rejects every argument and refuses to let her touch his hand. Whether she is entirely false or partly sincere is left open, and readers divide sharply.

Then Harapha of Gath, a giant and a champion, who has come to look at the wreck of a famous strong man and to sneer. He is a bully with no intention of fighting a blind slave, and the encounter revives Samson: he challenges Harapha to single combat, invokes his God, and for the first time speaks like the man he was. Harapha leaves.

A Philistine officer summons Samson to perform feats of strength at the temple feast. He refuses twice, on the grounds that his law forbids attending an idolatrous festival. Then he stops, and says he feels rousing motions disposing his thoughts to something extraordinary, and goes.

Manoa returns, pleased with his negotiation, and while he is talking a great noise is heard. The messenger describes the temple full of lords and priests, Samson set between the pillars, asking his guide to let him lean and rest, standing with his head bowed as if in prayer, and then pulling the building down on himself and everyone in it. The chorus works through the news in two odes, the famous image of the phoenix among them, and Manoa refuses to mourn, saying his son has quit himself like Samson and there is nothing here for tears. The last line settles on calm of mind, all passion spent.

How to read it

Read Judges 13 to 16 first. It is short, and Milton relies on it for everything he does not say.

Read the preface. It tells you what game is being played, and the appeal to Aristotle on catharsis matters for the final chorus, which is essentially a claim that the play has done what tragedy is supposed to do.

Read the choruses aloud. They look strange on the page and the irregular lines make sense in the ear. They are also the part of the poem where Milton’s own doubts get said out loud, since the chorus is never quite right about anything.

Hold the 1671 context steady. Milton was blind, politically defeated, living under a restored monarchy he had argued against in print at the risk of his life, and writing about a blind champion among idolaters who had lost everything through his own fault. You do not need to turn the poem into an allegory to hear it.

The great critical question is the ending. Stanley Fish’s influential reading points out that Milton gives us no evidence at all that the rousing motions are from God: no voice, no sign, only Samson’s report. Others find the whole design of the play a movement of regeneration. Decide what you think the poem gives you and what it withholds, and notice that the massacre kills the Philistine nobility gathered for a religious festival and that the chorus rejoices.

Questions it raises

• Are the rousing motions a divine call? What in the play could possibly settle it, and does Milton withhold that deliberately?
• Samson blames himself entirely. Is his self-condemnation accurate, or is it part of what he has to get past?
• Dalila offers four different defences in succession. Does that make her a liar, or a person assembling whatever will work?
• The chorus consoles, generalises and gets things wrong. What is it for, if not to tell us how to feel?
• Is the ending a deliverance, a suicide, or a slaughter of civilians at a religious ceremony? Can it be more than one of these?
• Milton says the play was not meant to be staged. What does a tragedy lose, and what does it gain, by being read rather than seen?