“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674sleep, and shaking her invincible locks” (CPW II, 558); he now takes the blinded
and defeated Samson, “Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves”(41) and engaged in
a painful process of self-scrutiny, as a figure for the defeated Puritans and especially
their leaders. The poem achieves a brilliant mimesis of the confusions attending
moments of political crisis and choice, requiring readers – and especially the Puritan
dissenters – to think through the hard questions raised by the revolution and its
failure, so as to prepare themselves should God offer them a new chance at liberty.
Some questions raised by Samson’s experience – and that of Milton’s Englishmen –
are these: How is a nation to know the liberators raised up by God to promote
change? What signs are reliable indexes of God’s favor to or God’s rejection of
leaders or nations? How can would-be liberators know themselves to be chosen or
repudiated? Or know when they are led by God and when by their own desires?
Can flawed humans be divine instruments? Does God ever inspire to action outside
the law and outside his own law? What imperatives for political action follow from
apparent signs of God’s special interventions? How far can we take the past as guide
to the present? Or guard against leaders’ deception or delusion? How does human
political action relate to the course of providential history?
Samson’s anguished opening soliloquy reveals his physical and psychological pain,
misery, bitterness, and despondency. But the first lines – “A little onward lend thy
guiding hand / To these dark steps, a little further on; / For yonder bank hath
choice of Sun or shade” – intimate that he is being guided by some unseen power
to a place affording “choice” of salvation or eternal darkness, a place where he feels
“amends, / The breath of Heav’n fresh-blowing” (9–10). Soon, however, his mis-
eries again overwhelm him and restless thoughts rush upon him “like a deadly
swarm / Of Hornets arm’d” (19–20). He reinterprets the signs that once seemed
clear evidence of his vocation as Nazarite and liberator as a perverse mockery:
“God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal / How slight the gift was, hung
it in my Hair” (58–9). But, like Adam and Satan at comparable moments in Paradise
Lost, he has to admit that the fault is his own. In their Parodos or entry ode the
chorus of Danites, Samson’s friends and tribesmen, are shocked and baffled by the
contrast between his former great exploits and his present bondage and blindness,
sentiments relevant to the oppressed Puritans who have seen their former leaders
denounced, reviled, imprisoned, broken, executed, and their very corpses made a
spectacle of degradation.^132 The chorus customarily interprets what has happened
and is happening in terms of maxims, proverbs, and exemplary histories; they resist
coming to terms with the extraordinary. In their entry ode they can only account
for Samson’s fall by the familiar tragic formula of the wheel of fortune: he was high
and now is low, a “mirror of our fickle state” (164).
The Danites shift to a dialogic role for the first agon, in which the question at
issue is whether Samson ever had a divine mission to liberate his people – clearly
relevant to retrospectives on the English revolution. Full of bitterness at having
become an object of ridicule, Samson blames God (as Adam did) for making him