Late Milton

Art by Elliot Skow

1. Milton’s final work, Samson Agonistes, is built on an historical and aesthetic foundation many layers deep—as one might expect from this poet: ancient greek tragedy; the Aristotelian theory of tragedy it inspired; the Biblical story of Samson, of which this is a transformational re-telling; and Samson’s place in the larger history of Israel. As well, there is Milton’s own personal and political story: of losing his sight; of supporting a revolution that succeeded and then failed; of living diminished in the aftermath of that failure. All of these have clear connections to the events in the poem. But for those of us who know little about any of them, the poem should still have some interest.

2. Samson is born with divinely-given super-strength. He uses that strength, at one point, to slaughter one thousand Philistines (enemies of the Israelites) with just a jawbone. But his wife Delilah betrays him, and the Philistines cut his hair, take his strength, and blind him. When Milton’s poem opens all this is in the past. Now Samson is in prison, and resigned to death:

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggery, or decrepit age!
Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,
...
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

A group of Israelites that attends him (the “Chorus”) characterizes him thus:

how he lies at random, carelessly diffused,
With languished head unpropped,
As one past hope, abandoned,
And by himself given over.

But by the end of the play, he’s revived:

 ... I begin to feel
Some rousing motions in me which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts.

At the Philistines’ festival for their god, he pulls down their temple, killing all: a final tragic triumph. But what roused these “rousing motions”? This is the play’s central psychological question: what brought about this transformation from despair to hope and to action.

3. Some critics hold that there is a “general aesthetic category” of “late style”: late Shakespeare and late Beethoven do not just differ, in their turn, from earlier Shakespeare and earlier Beethoven; they instantiate features common to and constitutive of “lateness.” As Gordon Teskey explains it,