[Milton-L] Samson's Prayer

[jenniferjoe]

Perhaps  this thread has run its course.  But even so:

Carol Barton has written of Samson having an epiphany while with head enclined he prays and/ or thinks, an epiphany that can be summed in up the thought "thy will be done."  

This is quite possible,  But  If Samson experienced that epiphany, why wouldn't his subsequent words reflect it?  Why didn't Milton have him say, "Thy will be done", which would have been a saintly final word.

Samson doesn't mention God at all in his last words--a fact well noted and often deplored.  That's puzzling, because he has spoken of himself and God frequently in the play.

The reason for Samson's silence about God is, I think, that he has been thoroughly compromised.  He is dressed in the livery of a Philistian servant; he has provided entertainment for the Philistines to help them honor Dagon.  There's reason for this, other than any depravity on the part of Samson: he intuited, in his rousing motions, that he might be able to defeat the Philistines by, in effect, becoming one of them.  That was  the only way to close with them.  Alienating him from God also is his blindness and consequent helplessness; in the OT, the servants of God aren't handicapped; they  must be whole.   For all these reasons, it would appear ludicrously incongruous for Samson to  declare that he is following the will of God and acting as His agent when he pulls down the temple.

Instead of denying his degradation by his final words, he integrates it into his idolatrous performance.  His  destruction of the temple is the last, show-stopping  act  of that performance.  "Such other trial of strength, yet greater."  By announcing his action as his final feat, he also turns into into a devastating practical joke on this audience.

All in all, the form he gives to his last act is stroke of genius.  I can imagine another kind of epiphany coming to him, in addition to the one Carol images, the kind that reveals to an artistic creator the solution to a problem of form.

Joe Mayer