“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674glory; and he sees himself making a self-respecting choice of work over idleness –
to “drudge and earn my bread” (573). Also at issue is how to interpret Samson’s
new growth of hair. Samson reads these “redundant locks / Robustious to no
purpose” (568–9) as a public talisman of his failure and uselessness to God and his
people. Manoa reads them as a sign that God has further use for Samson, but he
indulges a facile optimism in supposing that God will simply obliterate the conse-
quences of Samson’s sin and restore his sight so he can again take up his mission.
This exchange brings Samson to his nadir, plunging him into despair. His inner
experience of sin’s terrible effects – “faintings, swounings of despair, / And sense of
Heav’ns desertion” (631–2) – leads him to find an absolute disjunction between
past and present, election and reprobation: “I was his nursling once and choice
delight, / His destin’d from the womb, /... But now [he] hath cast me off as never
known, /... Nor am I in the list of them that hope” (633–47). But Samson can
still resist a belief in easy miracles and sense that he should wait where he is, not
retreat into privateness and passivity, giving over all engagement with the public
sphere. That decision leaves him (and a comparable decision would leave the dis-
senters) poised to respond when inner reformation is complete, when opportunity
comes, and when God might prompt a rousing motion.
In their ode beginning “Many are the sayings of the wise /... Extolling Pa-
tience as the truest fortitude,” the chorus now admits that such proverbial wisdom
offers little help to the afflicted, “Unless he feel within / Some sourse of consolation
from above” (652–64). They have learned something about inward spiritual expe-
rience. But as they echo Job and the Psalmist – “God of our Fathers, what is man!”
- they are only able to conclude that an arbitrary God often brings just and unjust
alike to a miserable end.
Samson’s agon with Dalila, the longest of the five, brings Samson right out of his
despair as he resists the temptation to which he earlier succumbed. Here the inter-
pretative focus shifts from the signs associated with Samson to Dalila’s self-presenta-
tion, which Milton treats as an enigma. Dalila’s real nature, her reasons for coming
to Samson, her reasons for betraying him, and her claims to repentance, are all open
to and are given multiple interpretations, challenging Samson, the chorus, and the
reader to penetrate to the truth of character beneath rhetoric and stereotypes. Samson’s
fierce denunciations – “Out, out Hyaena; these are thy wonted arts / And arts of
every woman false like thee” (748–9) – and his implacable rebuffs to her pleas for
forgiveness, unlike Adam with Eve, have been seen as evidence of Milton’s mi-
sogyny, or his psychic anxiety about the feminine, or his painful remembrance of
his own marital troubles with Mary Powell, or his direct reflection of contempo-
rary gender and societal stereotypes.^135 But while Samson’s rage and bitterness against
Dalila wells up at times from the depths of Milton’s psyche, Milton is not Samson,
nor is this scene an endorsement of gender stereotypes.
Like Samson, Dalila speaks constantly of herself and her motives, but she seems to
have no inner life; she seems rather to have internalized all the contemporary stere-