Chapter 2 - Rhythms of will

Summary

THE NAKED THEW AND SINEW OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Despite being counselled by his father not to give up hope of his deliverance from captivity, Milton's Samson turns despairingly against arguments for patience. Manoah had warned his son not to believe the temptings of his mind, and not to add mental anguish to bodily imprisonment. But the blind Samson knows that his anguish is of the mind as much as it is of the body. As so often through the early passages of the poem, he turns inward to the torments of the captive, ‘inmost mind’:

O that torment should not be confined

To the body's wounds and sores

With maladies innumerable

in heart, head, brest and reins;

But must secret passage find

To the inmost mind,

There exercise all his fierce accidents.

And on her purest spirits prey,

As on entrails, joints and limbs,

With answerable pains, but more intense,

Though void of corporal sense.

My griefs not only pain me

As a lingering disease,

But finding no redress, ferment and rage,

Nor less than wounds immedicable

Rankle, and fester, and gangrene,

To black mortification.

Thoughts my tormentors armed with deadly stings

Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts,

Exasperate, exulcerate, and raise

Dire inflammation which no cooling herb

Or med'cinal liquor can assuage,

Nor breath of vernal air from snowy alp.

Sleep hath forsook and given me o'er

To death's benumbing opium as my only cure.

Thence faintings, swoonings of despair,

And sense of Heaven's desertion.

(Samson Agonistes, 606—32)