The Work
Samson Agonistes was published in 1671 alongside Paradise Regained in a single volume. It is a closet drama - designed for reading rather than performance - of 1,758 lines in blank verse, modeled on the formal conventions of Greek tragedy (choral odes, single setting, messenger speech, catastrophe). The title translates as 'Samson the Wrestler' or 'Samson the Athlete' (agonistes from the Greek agon, contest, struggle), indicating both the athletic/military content and the spiritual struggle that is the play's inner subject.
The poem covers the final day of Samson's life. It opens with Samson in his Philistine prison, blinded and in chains, during a day of festival when he has been granted respite from grinding labor. He is visited by his father Manoa (who is negotiating his ransom), by Dalila (who offers false comfort and implicitly asks for forgiveness), by the Philistine champion Harapha (who taunts him), and by a Philistine officer who orders him to perform at the festival. The poem ends with a messenger's account of Samson's destruction of the temple - 'Self-killed, not willingly' - and Manoa's and the chorus's efforts to find consolation.
Milton wrote the poem while blind, imprisoned by political defeat, and in physical pain - circumstances that make his identification with Samson deeply personal. He does not sentimentalize this identification: he presents Samson with genuine complexity, including his moral failures and his ongoing spiritual uncertainty.
Biblical Engagement
Judges 16:28 ('And Samson called unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes') is the prayer that precedes Samson's final act. Milton develops this brief prayer into an extended psychological and spiritual drama: the entire poem is the story of how Samson arrives at the prayer, the spiritual preparation that makes it possible. The prayer represents the recovery of Samson's relationship with God after his betrayal of his Nazirite vow through Dalila.
Judges 13:3-5 (the angel's announcement to Samson's mother of his birth and his Nazirite dedication) establishes Samson's vocational identity: he was set apart from birth by a divine commission, and his failure (the betrayal of his Nazirite vow) is a failure of that commission. Milton develops the concept of the Nazirite dedication in ways that make it available as a more general image of any believer's vocation: the commission received, the failure to fulfill it, the question of restoration.
Psalm 88:6 ('Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps') is the Psalm of absolute desolation - the only Psalm in the Psalter that ends without any movement toward consolation - and it provides the emotional context for Samson's opening soliloquy. Samson in the Philistine prison, blind and abandoned, is in the Psalmist's lowest pit. The poem's question is whether there can be any movement from this pit back toward the divine purpose.
Author and Context
Milton (1608-1674) wrote Samson Agonistes in the 1660s, during the Restoration period. He had been a senior official in Cromwell's government - Secretary for Foreign Languages - and had been briefly imprisoned after the Restoration before being released, probably through the intervention of Andrew Marvell. He was living in relative obscurity in London, blind, politically disgraced, and physically ill.
The identification between the poet and his protagonist is difficult to avoid: both are blind, both have been instruments of divine purpose, both have experienced public disgrace and political defeat, and both are sitting among enemies wondering whether God's purpose can still be enacted through them. Milton's headnote to the poem carefully dissociates dramatic from personal application, but the parallels are too extensive to be accidental.
Themes
The poem's central theological theme is the question of divine agency in human violence. Samson's final act - pulling down the temple - kills not only the Philistine leadership but a large number of ordinary Philistines. The poem does not minimize this: the messenger reports 'a universal groan / As if the whole inhabitation perished.' The question of whether God can sanction mass violence as an instrument of divine purpose has been urgently debated in modern readings of the poem, particularly after September 11, 2001, when the parallels between Samson and suicide terrorism became impossible to ignore.
The poem also meditates extensively on the nature of divine guidance in the absence of direct divine communication. Samson does not receive a clear prophetic word commanding his final act; he acts on an 'intimate impulse' - a felt sense of divine prompting that he cannot verify externally. This raises the question of how to discern genuine divine prompting from rationalization of violence.
Dalila's visit is the poem's most ambiguous episode. She asks Samson's forgiveness and offers to care for him; Samson refuses to forgive her, condemning her absolutely. Milton's treatment of this scene has generated intense critical debate: is Samson's rejection of Dalila spiritually appropriate (the refusal of a compromising mercy) or morally flawed (an inability to forgive that itself requires repentance)?
Reception
The poem was not staged in its own time. Its first theatrical productions came in the twentieth century, when its dramatic qualities began to be appreciated. After September 11, 2001, it received enormous critical attention as a text that seemed uncannily to anticipate contemporary questions about religious violence, divine mandate, and the ethics of suicide in service of a cause.
Legacy
The poem's influence on subsequent literature has been primarily through its psychological complexity - its willingness to present a biblical hero with genuine moral ambiguity - and its formal achievement as a Christian tragedy. George Frideric Handel's oratorio Samson (1743), based partly on Samson Agonistes, was the most immediate musical legacy. In literature, the poem's treatment of the tension between prophetic vocation and human failure influenced the Romantic and Victorian traditions of the alienated artist-prophet.