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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.