The Shorter Poems and Samson Agonistes

Summary

This volume gathers Milton's poetry outside the two epics: the English and Italian poems first collected in Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645, dated 1646 on the title page), the sonnets and occasional pieces added in the enlarged Poems of 1673, the psalm translations, and the closet tragedy Samson Agonistes, published in 1671 with Paradise Regained. The library's attached text is H. C. Beeching's Oxford edition, which keeps the old spelling and also contains the epics. Read in order, the poems trace a single vocation. The ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629), written at twenty-one, sets the Incarnation against the silencing of the pagan oracles. The paired poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso imagine an ideal day for two temperaments, the cheerful and the contemplative, and end with the second turning toward the 'dimm religious light' of study and devotion. The masque performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634, usually called Comus, sets a Lady lost in a wood against an enchanter who tempts her with pleasure; her chastity resists him, though only the river-nymph Sabrina can release her from his chair. Lycidas (1637), an elegy for the drowned Cambridge contemporary Edward King, uses the conventions of pastoral to ask why the diligent die young, attacks a corrupt clergy, and ends in a vision of King received in heaven. The sonnets turn the Italian form to public and private uses: the slaughter of the Waldensians in Piedmont, Cromwell and Fairfax, the poet's blindness, his dead wife returned in a dream. Samson Agonistes, written on the model of Greek tragedy and expressly not intended for the stage, follows the blind and captive Samson through a single day in Gaza. A sequence of visitors (the Chorus of Danites, his father Manoa, his wife Dalila, the giant Harapha) tests him; through these encounters he moves from despair and self-accusation toward renewed trust, feels 'rouzing motions' within, goes to the Philistine feast, and pulls down the temple of Dagon on the lords and himself. The Chorus closes in 'calm of mind all passion spent'. Across forty years the poems return to the same questions: how a gifted person should wait on God, how loss and delay can be borne, and whether providence is just when it seems to hide its face.

Plot or Argument

• Early devotional poems (1629-1633)

  The Nativity Ode celebrates Christ's birth as the moment harmony returns to creation and the oracles fall silent; The Passion breaks off unfinished, with a note that the author found the subject beyond his years. On Time, Upon the Circumcision and At a Solemn Musick are short meditations in the same vein. Sonnet VII, 'How soon hath Time', written about his twenty-fourth birthday, worries that he has produced nothing yet and resolves to trust the 'great task Master'.

• Occasional and companion poems

  Two jesting epitaphs mourn Thomas Hobson, the Cambridge carrier who died in 1631 when plague stopped his trips to London; the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester laments a young noblewoman who died in childbirth. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, written in matching octosyllabic couplets, banish each other's presiding spirit and then describe a day and night of pleasures, rustic and festive in the first, solitary, scholarly and musical in the second.

• Masques: Arcades and Comus (1634)

  Arcades is a brief entertainment for the Countess Dowager of Derby. The longer Ludlow masque, written for the Earl of Bridgewater with music by Henry Lawes, sends his three children through a wood where the Lady is captured by Comus, son of Bacchus and Circe. The debate between them sets the enchanter's argument that nature's bounty is meant to be used against the Lady's defence of temperance; her brothers rout Comus but cannot free her, and the attendant Spirit summons Sabrina.

• Lycidas (1637)

  A shepherd-poet mourns his fellow, asks where the nymphs were, and digresses twice: on fame, answered by Phoebus with the promise of heavenly judgment, and on the corrupt shepherds of the church, denounced by St Peter. A procession of flowers dresses the absent bier before the poem turns: Lycidas is 'sunk low, but mounted high' and is welcomed in heaven, and the uncouth swain rises for 'fresh Woods, and Pastures new'.

• Sonnets of the middle years (1642-1658)

  Sonnets addressed to friends, patrons and statesmen mingle with poems on his own condition: the massacre of Protestants in Piedmont (1655), the two sonnets on his blindness, the poems to Cyriack Skinner, and the dream of his 'late espoused Saint'. The verses On the New Forcers of Conscience attack Presbyterian intolerance in a 'tailed' sonnet.

• Psalm translations

  Two groups of metrical psalms, Psalms 80-88 in common measure (1648) and Psalms 1-8 in varied meters (1653), along with the early paraphrases of Psalms 114 and 136.

• Samson Agonistes (published 1671)

  A prose preface defends tragedy on Aristotle's ground of catharsis. In a single day Samson, blind at the mill, laments his fall; the Chorus and Manoa visit; Manoa plans a ransom; Dalila seeks reconciliation and is refused; Harapha comes to taunt and is defied; a Public Officer summons Samson to perform at Dagon's feast. Samson first refuses, then follows an inward prompting. A Messenger reports the fall of the temple, Manoa resolves to bury his son with honour, and the Chorus ends in consolation.

Characters

• The speaker of the early poems and sonnets, poet-persona

  A young man anxious about his calling who becomes, in the later sonnets, a blind public servant arguing with and then submitting to providence; the voice is close to Milton's own but shaped by each poem's form.

• The Lady, heroine of the Ludlow masque

  Played in 1634 by Lady Alice Egerton, then fifteen; lost in the wood, she defends temperance and chastity against Comus with confidence and argument.

• Comus, enchanter, son of Bacchus and Circe

  Leader of a rout of beast-headed revellers, eloquent in praising nature's abundance, who binds the Lady to an enchanted chair.

• The Attendant Spirit (Thyrsis), guardian

  A heavenly guardian disguised as a shepherd who guides the brothers and summons Sabrina.

• Lycidas, subject of the elegy

  The pastoral name for Edward King, a Fellow of Christ's College drowned in the Irish Sea in August 1637.

• Samson, protagonist of the tragedy

  The Nazarite judge of Israel, blinded and enslaved after revealing the secret of his strength, who moves from despair and self-blame toward a last act he believes God prompts.

• Manoa, Samson's father

  A loving, practical old man who tries to ransom his son and whose hopes are overtaken by the catastrophe.

• Dalila, Samson's wife

  A Philistine woman who betrayed him; she comes offering care and excuses, and her motives remain open to argument.

• Harapha of Gath, Philistine giant

  A boastful champion who visits to mock Samson and refuses his challenge to combat.

• Chorus of Danites, Samson's tribesmen

  Friends who comfort, question and interpret, and who voice the closing judgment on providence.

Lessons

• Waiting as a form of service

  Sonnet VII and the sonnet usually numbered XIX ('When I consider how my light is spent', numbered XVI in Beeching) frame a lifetime's worry about the parable of the talents. In the first the young poet fears he has accomplished nothing; in the second the blind middle-aged poet fears his gift is useless. Each turns in its sestet, and Patience answers that God 'doth not need / Either man's work or his own gifts'. Students can watch how the Italian sonnet's octave and sestet carry a movement from complaint to correction.

  • Why does Patience 'prevent' the murmur before it is fully spoken? What is the poem's attitude to complaint?
  • Does 'They also serve who only stand and waite' praise passivity, or a different kind of readiness?
  • Compare the sonnet to Cyriack Skinner. What support does the poet name there that he does not name in the other blindness sonnet?

• Mirth and melancholy as a pair

  L'Allegro and Il Penseroso each begin by banishing the other's goddess and then imagine a whole day governed by one temperament. Milton's 'divinest Melancholy' is not the black-bile sickness of the physicians but a sober, studious and devout seriousness, a distinction familiar from Renaissance writing on melancholy. The poems invite students to consider whether a well-ordered life needs both delight and contemplation, and to notice that only Il Penseroso ends in prayer and prophecy.

  • List the pleasures in each poem. What kind of person would choose each day?
  • Why does the melancholy that L'Allegro banishes differ from the Melancholy Il Penseroso hails?
  • Is the second poem meant as the better choice, or are they equal? Use the final lines of each.

• Temperance defended in argument

  In the Ludlow masque the Lady does not simply refuse Comus; she answers him. He argues that nature pours out her gifts to be enjoyed and that beauty hoarded is wasted; she replies that nature's bounty, rightly shared, would satisfy all, and that her mind cannot be touched though her body is bound. Yet she cannot free herself, and grace arrives through Sabrina. The masque teaches that virtue must be reasoned and steadfast while admitting that it also depends on help from beyond itself.

  • What is persuasive in Comus's speech, and where does the Lady locate its error?
  • Why can the brothers drive Comus away but not release their sister?
  • The Spirit's last lines say that if Virtue were feeble, heaven itself would stoop to her. What does that promise and what does it not?

• Elegy that questions before it consoles

  Lycidas asks hard questions in the pastoral manner: why the diligent poet should 'scorn delights, and live laborious dayes' if the Fury may cut his thread before the reward; why bad shepherds thrive while good ones drown. Milton lets each question stand at full strength before answering with Phoebus's word on heavenly fame and the final vision of King among the saints. Students should study how the poem's sudden shifts of voice and verse paragraph enact grief and recovery.

  • Why does the speaker interrupt himself after 'And slits the thin spun life'? Who answers him?
  • What is St Peter's complaint against the clergy, and why does it belong in an elegy?
  • How does the last verse paragraph change the poem's point of view, and why?

• Samson's recovery of trust

  Samson Agonistes is built of encounters rather than events. Samson begins by blaming himself for his blindness and captivity and by asking God for 'speedy death'. Manoa offers ransom and rest, Dalila offers comfort on her terms, Harapha offers insult; each refusal clarifies who Samson is. His decision to go to the feast comes from 'rouzing motions' he cannot fully explain. The drama leaves readers to judge whether his last act is obedience, vengeance, or both, and the Chorus's final word claims only that God 'seems to hide his face' and then returns.

  • Which visitor does Samson most need to refuse, and why?
  • How does the Chorus's 'Just are the ways of God' echo Paradise Lost, and does the play prove it?
  • The Messenger reports that Samson fell 'By his own hands'. How do Manoa and the Chorus interpret his death, and how should we?

Context

The shorter poems span the reign of Charles I, the civil wars, the Commonwealth and the Restoration. The early pieces belong to Milton's Cambridge years and his long period of private study, when he was still preparing for a poetic vocation and, at first, ordination; Lycidas's attack on the clergy, and the headnote added in 1645 saying that the poem foretells the ruin of a corrupted clergy, marks his turn against the Laudian church. The masque at Ludlow was written for the installation of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, as Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales, and performed by his children. The middle sonnets record public events of the 1640s and 1650s: the siege of Colchester, the Piedmont massacre of April 1655, the debates on liberty of conscience. Samson Agonistes, published after the Restoration, has been read in the light of the defeat of the Puritan cause and Milton's own blindness and danger, though the play never names its own moment.

Composition

The 1645 Poems collected work from 1629 to about 1637; the 1673 edition added later sonnets (omitting four political ones published only in 1694) and the psalms. A manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, preserves drafts of Comus, Lycidas and several sonnets. Samson Agonistes was licensed in 1670 and published in 1671. Its date of composition is disputed: the traditional view places it after Paradise Lost, in the late 1660s, while others, following W. R. Parker, have argued for the 1640s or 1650s; no documentary evidence settles the question. Beeching's text, used here, follows the original printings and keeps Milton's spelling.

Reception

Samuel Johnson in his Life of Milton (1779) disliked Lycidas as artificial pastoral and found Samson wanting a middle, while praising the sonnets sparingly; Wordsworth answered with a sonnet in praise of Milton's sonnets. The Nativity Ode, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were favourites of the Romantics and of composers, notably Handel, whose L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1740) and oratorio Samson (1743) set Milton's words. Lycidas has been called the greatest short poem in English by many later critics. Samson's ending has drawn sharp argument in recent decades over whether the play endorses its hero's violence. The Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990) printed the English minor poems and Samson in volume 29 with Paradise Lost.

Comparisons

• Paradise Lost

  The Chorus's 'Just are the ways of God, / And justifiable to Men' deliberately recalls the epic's promise to 'justifie the wayes of God to men'; Paradise Lost argues the case on the scale of the cosmos, while Samson tests it in one blind man's day at the mill.

• On His Blindness (Sonnet XIX)

  The library's separate record treats the blindness sonnet alone; here it sits within the sequence of sonnets beside Sonnet VII on youthful delay and the Cyriack Skinner sonnet, which together show the poet answering his own complaint three different ways.

• Ajax, Electra, The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes

  Milton's preface names Sophocles among the models of true tragedy. Like Philoctetes, Samson is a wounded hero abandoned in suffering whom others try to bring back to usefulness, and like Ajax he dies by his own act after humiliation; Milton reframes both patterns within a providential faith Sophocles does not share.

• Areopagitica

  The Ludlow masque's defence of virtue, including the claim that 'Vertue may be assail'd, but never hurt' (spoken by the Elder Brother) anticipates the 1644 tract's claim that Milton cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue; both insist that virtue must meet temptation, though the masque relies more openly on supernatural aid.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Milton went blind in his early forties, and the volume contains some of the most searching poems in English on blindness, written from inside the condition. Samson Agonistes is also explicitly medical in its theory: its preface defines tragedy's catharsis by analogy with humoral physic, in which melancholic remedies are used against melancholy. Samson's long complaint after Manoa leaves describes grief as a disease of the mind in surgical and pharmacological terms (wounds immedicable, gangrene, inflammation no herb can assuage, sleeplessness, opium), a vivid early modern account of what modern readers might call depression; that label is a reading, not the play's own. Il Penseroso shows the period's distinction between a contemplative melancholy and the disease of melancholia. The Hobson epitaphs depend on the 1630-1631 plague restrictions at Cambridge, and the Marchioness of Winchester epitaph and the sonnet on his late wife both concern deaths connected with childbirth. Whether Samson's death should be counted suicide is a question the play itself raises and its characters answer with care.

• Samson Agonistes, preface ('Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy')

  Milton explains Aristotle's purgation of pity and fear by comparison with physic, where things of melancholic quality are used against melancholy and salt against salt humours.

  Humoral Medicine Philosophy AS Therapy Melancholia Depression
• Samson Agonistes, ll. 67-109

  Samson's lament for his blindness, asking why sight was confined to the tender ball of the eye rather than diffused like touch, and calling himself a living death and a moving grave.

  Disability Deformity Grief
• Samson Agonistes, ll. 606-651

  Samson describes torments of mind that rankle and gangrene like incurable wounds, sleeplessness relieved only by the wish for death as opiate, faintings and despair, and prays for speedy death.

  Melancholia Depression Opium Laudanum Sleep Insomnia
• Samson Agonistes, ll. 180-186

  The Chorus offers counsel as salve, saying apt words can swage the tumours of a troubled mind like balm on festered wounds.

  Philosophy AS Therapy
• Samson Agonistes, ll. 1570-1590 and following

  The Messenger reports that Samson died by his own hands in pulling down the temple; Manoa asks whether it was self-violence, and the account presents it as both vow and sacrifice.

  Suicide Death Dying
• Sonnets XVI (usually XIX) and To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon his Blindness

  The poet's two sonnets on his own blindness, one answered by Patience, the other by the conscience of having lost his sight in the defence of liberty.

  Disability Deformity
• L'Allegro, ll. 1-10; Il Penseroso, ll. 1-30

  The banishment of a monstrous Melancholy born of Cerberus and blackest midnight, then the praise of a sober, studious Melancholy; useful for the Renaissance double sense of the term.

  Melancholia Depression Humoral Medicine
• On the University Carrier who sickn'd in the time of his vacancy (and Another on the Same)

  Comic epitaphs for Thomas Hobson, who fell ill and died when plague restrictions stopped his journeys between Cambridge and London.

  Plague Epidemic
• An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, ll. 19-34

  Jane Paulet's death in childbirth, with Atropos coming in place of Lucina and the child buried before birth.

  Childbirth Maternal Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Poetry

  Write a pair of short poems in the manner of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso describing an ideal school day for two different temperaments, in octosyllabic couplets.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Manoa and the Chorus on the evening after Samson's burial, in which Manoa asks whether his son died by his own will or by God's.

• Essay

  Compare Sonnet VII and the sonnet on his blindness. How has the poet's understanding of his gift and of God's demand changed across twenty years?

• Classroom

  Divide the Lady's debate with Comus into speeches and have two students deliver them; the class then identifies the strongest argument on each side and the point at which the Lady refuses to argue further.

• Fiction

  Retell Lycidas as a short story told by a fellow student at Cambridge in 1637, keeping the questions the poem asks but in prose.

Further Reading

• Paradise Regained, John Milton

  Published with Samson Agonistes in 1671; a brief epic of the temptation in the wilderness that makes a natural companion to the tragedy.

• Lives of the Poets: Milton, Samuel Johnson

  Johnson's famous objections to Lycidas and Samson, still useful for provoking argument.

• The Book of Judges, chapters 13-16, Hebrew Scriptures

  The biblical source of Samson's story, with the angelic annunciation, Delilah and the fall of Dagon's temple.

• The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton

  Published 1621; the encyclopedic account of melancholy against which L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are often read.