| |
| SAMSON. A little onward lend thy guiding hand | |
| To these dark steps, a little further on; | |
| For yonder bank hath choice of sun or shade. | |
| There I am wont to sit, when any chance | |
| Relieves me from my task of servile toil, | 5 |
| Daily in the common prison else enjoined me, | |
| Where I, a prisoner chained, scarce freely draw | |
| The air, imprisoned also, close and damp, | |
| Unwholesome draught. But here I feel amends— | |
| The breath of Heaven fresh blowing, pure and sweet, | 10 |
| With day-spring born; here leave me to respire. | |
| This day a solemn feast the people hold | |
| To Dagon, their sea-idol, and forbid | |
| Laborious works. Unwillingly this rest | |
| Their superstition yields me; hence, with leave | 15 |
| Retiring from the popular noise, I seek | |
| This unfrequented place to find some ease— | |
| Ease to the body some, none to the mind | |
| From restless thoughts, that, like a deadly swarm | |
| Of hornets armed, no sooner found alone | 20 |
| But rush upon me thronging, and present | |
| Times past, what once I was, and what am now. | |
| Oh, wherefore was my birth from Heaven foretold | |
| Twice by an Angel, who at last, in sight | |
| Of both my parents, all in flames ascended | 25 |
| From off the altar where an offering burned, | |
| As in a fiery column charioting | |
| His godlike presence, and from some great act | |
| Or benefit revealed to Abraham’s race? | |
| Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed | 30 |
| As of a person separate to God, | |
| Designed for great exploits, if I must die | |
| Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out, | |
| Made of my enemies the scorn and gaze, | |
| To grind in brazen fetters under task | 35 |
| With this heaven-gifted strength? O glorious strength, | |
| Put to the labour of a beast, debased | |
| Lower than bond-slave! Promise was that I | |
| Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver! | |
| Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him | 40 |
| Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, | |
| Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke. | |
| Yet stay; let me not rashly call in doubt | |
| Divine prediction. What if all foretold | |
| Had been fulfilled but through mine own default? | 45 |
| Whom have I to complain of but myself, | |
| Who this high gift of strength committed to me, | |
| In what part lodged, how easily bereft me, | |
| Under the seal of silence could not keep, | |
| But weakly to a woman must reveal it, | 50 |
| O’ercome with importunity and tears? | |
| O impotence of mind in body strong! | |
| But what is strength without a double share | |
| Of wisdom? Vast, unwieldly, burdensome, | |
| Proudly secure, yet liable to fall | 55 |
| By weakest subtleties; not made to rule, | |
| But to subserve where wisdom bears command. | |
| God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal | |
| How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair. | |
| But peace! I must not quarrel with the will | 60 |
| Of highest dispensation, which herein | |
| Haply had ends above my reach to know. | |
| Suffices that to me strength is my bane, | |
| And proves the source of all my miseries— | |
| So many, and so huge, that each apart | 65 |
| Would ask a life to wail. But, chief of all, | |
| O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! | |
| Blind among enemies! O worse than chains, | |
| Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age! | |
| Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct, | 70 |
| And all her various objects of delight | |
| Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased. | |
| Inferior to the vilest now become | |
| Of man or worm, the vilest here excel me: | |
| They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed | 75 |
| To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, | |
| Within doors, or without, still as a fool, | |
| In power of others, never in my own— | |
| Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half. | |
| O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, | 80 |
| Irrecoverábly dark, total eclipse | |
| Without all hope of day! | |
| O first-created Beam, and thou great Word, | |
| “Let there be light, and light was over all,” | |
| Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree? | 85 |
| The Sun to me is dark | |
| And silent as the Moon, | |
| When she deserts the night, | |
| Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. | |
| Since light so necessary is to life, | 90 |
| And almost life itself, if it be true | |
| That light is in the soul, | |
| She all in every part, why was the sight | |
| To such a tender ball as the eye confined, | |
| So obvious and so easy to be quenched, | 95 |
| And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused, | |
| That she might look at will through every pore? | |
| Then had I not been thus exiled from light, | |
| As in the land of darkness, yet in light, | |
| To live a life half dead, a living death, | 100 |
| And buried; but, O yet more miserable! | |
| Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave; | |
| Buried, yet not exempt, | |
| By privilege of death and burial, | |
| From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs; | 105 |
| But made hereby obnoxious more | |
| To all the miseries of life, | |
| Life in captivity | |
| Among inhuman foes. | |
| But who are these? for with joint pace I hear | 110 |
| The tread of many feet steering this way; | |
| Perhaps my enemies, who come to stare | |
| At my affliction, and perhaps to insult— | |
| Their daily practice to afflict me more. | |
| Chor. This, this is he; softly a while; | 115 |
| Let us not break in upon him. | |
| O change beyond report, thought, or belief! | |
| See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused, | |
| With languished head unpropt, | |
| As one past hope, abandoned, | 120 |
| And by himself given over, | |
| In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds | |
| O’er-worn and soiled. | |
| Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he, | |
| That heroic, that renowned, | 125 |
| Irresistible Samson? whom, unarmed, | |
| No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast, could withstand; | |
| Who tore the lion as the lion tears the kid; | |
| Ran on embattled armies clad in iron, | |
| And, weaponless himself, | 130 |
| Made arms ridiculous, useless the forgery | |
| Of brazen shield and spear, the hammered cuirass, | |
| Chalybean-tempered steel, and frock of mail | |
| Adamantean proof: | |
| But safest he who stood aloof, | 135 |
| When insupportably his foot advanced, | |
| In scorn of their proud arms and warlike tools, | |
| Spurned them to death by troops. The bold Ascalonite | |
| Fled from his lion ramp; old warriors turned | |
| Their plated backs under his heel, | 140 |
| Or grovelling soiled their crested helmets in the dust. | |
| Then with what trivial weapon came to hand, | |
| The jaw of a dead ass, his sword of bone, | |
| A thousand foreskins fell, the flower of Palestine, | |
| In Ramath-lechi, famous to this day: | 145 |
| Then by main force pulled up, and on his shoulders bore, | |
| The gates of Azza, post and massy bar, | |
| Up to the hill by Hebron, seat of giants old— | |
| No journey of a sabbath-day, and loaded so— | |
| Like whom the Gentiles feign to bear up Heaven. | 150 |
| Which shall I first bewail— | |
| Thy bondage or lost sight, | |
| Prison within prison | |
| Inseparably dark? | |
| Thou art become (O worst imprisonment!) | 155 |
| The dungeon of thyself; thy soul | |
| (Which men enjoying sight oft without cause complain) | |
| Imprisoned now indeed, | |
| In real darkness of the body dwells, | |
| Shut up from outward light | 160 |
| To incorporate with gloomy night; | |
| For inward light, alas! | |
| Puts forth no visual beam. | |
| O mirror of our fickle state, | |
| Since man on earth, unparalleled, | 165 |
| The rarer thy example stands, | |
| By how much from the top of wondrous glory, | |
| Strongest of mortal men, | |
| To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen. | |
| For him I reckon not in high estate | 170 |
| Whom long descent of birth, | |
| Or the sphere of fortune, raises; | |
| But them whose strength, while virtue was her mate, | |
| Might have subdued the Earth, | |
| Universally crowned with highest praises. | 175 |
| Sams. I hear the sound of words; their sense the air | |
| Dissolves unjointed ere it reach my ear. | |
| Chor. He speaks: let us draw nigh. Matchless in might, | |
| The glory late of Israel, now the grief! | |
| We come, thy friends and neighbours not unknown. | 180 |
| From Eshtaol and Zora’s fruitful vale, | |
| To visit or bewail thee; or, if better, | |
| Counsel or consolation we may bring, | |
| Salve to thy sores: apt words have power to swage | |
| The tumours of a troubled mind, | 185 |
| And are as balm to festered wounds. | |
| Sams. Your coming, friends, revives me; for I learn | |
| Now of my own experience, not by talk, | |
| How counterfeit a coin they are who “friends” | |
| Bear in their superscription (of the most | 190 |
| I would be understood). In prosperous days | |
| They swarm, but in adverse withdraw their head, | |
| Not to be found, though sought. Ye see, O friends, | |
| How many evils have enclosed me round; | |
| Yet that which was the worst now least afflicts me, | 195 |
| Blindness; for, had I sight, confused with shame, | |
| How could I once look up, or heave the head, | |
| Who, like a foolish pilot, have shipwrecked | |
| My Vessel trusted to me from above, | |
| Gloriously rigged, and for a word, a tear, | 200 |
| Fool! have divulged the secret gift of God | |
| To a deceitful woman? Tell me, friends, | |
| Am I not sung and proverbed for a fool | |
| In every street? Do they not say, “How well | |
| Are come upon him his deserts”? Yet why? | 205 |
| Immeasurable strength they might behold | |
| In me; of wisdom nothing more than mean. | |
| This with the other should at least have paired; | |
| These two, proportioned ill, drove me transverse. | |
| Chor. Tax not divine disposal. Wisest men | 210 |
| Have erred, and by bad women been deceived; | |
| And shall again, pretend they ne’er so wise. | |
| Deject not, then, so overmuch thyself, | |
| Who hast of sorrow thy full load besides. | |
| Yet, truth to say, I oft have heard men wonder | 215 |
| Why thou should’st wed Philistian women rather | |
| Than of thine own tribe fairer, or as fair, | |
| At least of thy own nation, and as noble. | |
| Sams. The first I saw at Timna, and she pleased | |
| Me, not my parents, that I sought to wed | 220 |
| The daughter of an Infidel. They knew not | |
| That what I motioned was of God; I knew | |
| From intimate impulse, and therefore urged | |
| The marriage on, that, by occasion hence, | |
| I might begin Israel’s deliverance— | 225 |
| The work to which I was divinely called. | |
| She proving false, the next I took to wife | |
| (O that I never had! found wish too late!) | |
| Was in the vale of Sorec, Dalila, | |
| That specious monster, my accomplished snare. | 230 |
| I thought it lawful from my former act, | |
| And the same end, still watching to oppress | |
| Israel’s oppressors. Of what now I suffer | |
| She was not the prime cause, but I myself, | |
| Who, vanquished with a peal of words, (O weakness!) | 235 |
| Gave up my fort of silence to a woman. | |
| Chor. In seeking just occasion to provoke | |
| The Philistine, thy country’s enemy, | |
| Thou never wast remiss, I bear thee witness; | |
| Yet Israel still serves with all his sons. | 240 |
| Sams. That fault I take not on me, but transfer | |
| On Israel’s governors and heads of tribes, | |
| Who, seeing those great acts which God had done | |
| Singly be me against their conquerors, | |
| Acknowledged not, or not at all considered, | 245 |
| Deliverance offered. I, on the other side, | |
| Used no ambition to commend my deeds; | |
| The deeds themselves, though mute, spoke loud the doer. | |
| But they persisted deaf, and would not seem | |
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