The End of Samson Agonistes

Summary

WERE we to read again John Donne's great, and presumably last, sermon, “Death's Duel,” written in Lent of 1631, we would find this provocative observation about Samson.

[God the Lord] received Samson, who went out of this world in such a manner (consider it actively, consider it passively in his own death, and in those whom he slew with himself) as was subject to interpretation hard enough. Yet the Holy Ghost hath moved Saint Paul to celebrate Samson in his great catalogue [Heb. 11.32] and so doth all the church.

In Donne's context, this is hardly a gratuitous remark. His subject is a passage from Psalm 68, “to the Lord God belong the issues of death,” from which he will here press the second of three theses, the “issue of death is liberatio in morte,” “a deliverance in death,” the ways of departing this life in the death of the body. The remark about Samson he means as a warning to any would-be interpreters and their “ill conclusions” about the death of that body: ill conclusions about someone's reluctance to die or about someone who dies suddenly. In short, ill conclusions about a soul's disposition according to the manner of its departure from the world. “It belongs to God, and not to man, to pass judgment upon us at our death, or to conclude a dereliction on God's part upon the manner thereof” (410). Donne's point here is about unknowability and against presumptive interpretation.