ENL 10A: Samson’s Captivity: A Reawakening of Purpose

Jolene Patricia Brown

ENL 10A: English Lit to 1700

19 November 2009

Samson’s Captivity: A Reawakening of Purpose

Milton explores the captivity of man in Samson Agonistes as more than the jail and slave labor that Samson must endure at the hands of the Philistines. Captivity is the fallen condition of man, Milton argues, as man is born with obstacles that must be overcome before he can reach his full potential as a servant of God, which turns out to be another form of captivity. The example of Samson, from the biblical book of Judges, allows Milton to write make this argument from the perspective of a man who was born with gifts bestowed on no other man by God. This is an important perspective from which to write because if a great man can be held captive by his own imperfection, then all men can. It is only through recognition of man’s potential failings that one can reach their full potential despite their post-lapsarian condition.

Samson is captive to the Philistines because he is chained, and forced to do slave labor. This is his most obvious form of captivity: forced physical labor. Samson is forced to slave for those people he was born to destroy, and by doing so is also forced to consider all his failings: “From restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm / Of Hornets arm’d… / rush upon me thronging, and present / Times past, what once I was, and what am now” (19-22). For Samson, it is not the physical labor that is the worst part of the slavery. With nothing to do but work, he is forced to consider all his failings by his “restless thoughts” and he dissects his own fall from grace, which makes the physical work a form of “ease” from his thoughts (18). He comes to an important conclusion: that strength, though useful, is not immune to failure unless there is wisdom.

But what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom, vast, unwieldy, burdensome,
Proudly secure, yet liable to fall…
God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal
How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair. (53-55, 58-59)

Even his great gift of strength is a form of captivity for Samson because he did not have the wisdom to guard it properly. God endowed the strength with an inherent weakness by placing it in Samson’s hair thereby rendering Samson strong but not invincible. The captivity, therefore, is Samson’s false sense of security brought on by his lack of wisdom and overabundant strength which he does not realize until it is too late and he is physically captive to the Philistines: “Immeasurable strength they might behold / In me, of wisdom nothing more then mean; / This with the other should, at least, have paird, / These two proportion’d ill drove me transverse” (206-209).

The Philistines have also blinded him, depriving him of the light of the world and the light of God:

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse then chains…
Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annull’d, which might in part my grief have eas’d… (67-68, 70-72)

His blindness is a sensual captivity as Samson finds himself not only a slave to those he was intended to slay, but also without the guidance of his sight. It is sight that guides man in his daily life, without which one would wander hopelessly lost; without his sight Samson cannot make his way alone in the world. His blindness also implies he is without his God—another form of sight—as it is God who has, until now, guided Samson through his exploits against the Philistines. The sight that Samson has lost is multi-faceted: it is the physical sight in the world that allows him mobility and success in his battles against his enemies, but also the sight of God who has guided him in those battles. The loss of sight is a double-tragedy because he is deprived of a sensual pleasure and a spiritual pleasure, both of which are unbearable to Samson.

Before his captivity by the Philistines, Samson was captive to his passions as a man by allowing himself to be weakened by the love of a woman who is loyal to his enemy. Samson realizes he had fallen into service to woman, instead of in service to God when he states:

The base degree to which I am now fall’n,
these rags, this grinding, is not yet so base
As was my former servitude, ignoble,
Unmanly, ignominious, infamous,
True slavery, and that blindness worse then this,
That saw not how degenerately I serv’d. (414-419)

Both the physical captivity and the sensual captivity that he faces now in service to the Philistines is, he claims, better than his service to woman he paid before his fall. It is this captivity to woman that is another captivity that Samson is subject to, and another that he does not realize until he is already taken prisoner, betrayed by the woman he loved.

Though he ultimately takes responsibility for his own fall in admitting that “She [Delila] was not the prime cause” (234), he still laments his failing to identify her as a “specious Monster” and his “accomplisht snare” (230). The description of Delila as a “specious Monster” is especially telling, as the word specious, according to the OED, means “Having a fair or attractive appearance or character, calculated to make a favourable impression on the mind, but in reality devoid of the qualities apparently possessed” and “Of falsehood, bad qualities.” Samson is captive to her appearance, and his weakness for Delila echoes that of Adam’s for Eve in the garden of Paradise Lost, as both men allow women to have power over them. In Paradise Lost God was forced to remind Adam of the original hierarchy of subjection after the fall:

Was she [Eve] thy God, that her thou didst obey
Before his voice, or was she made they guide,
Superior, or but equal, that to her
Thou didst resign thy manhood, and the place
Wherein God set thee above her made of thee
And for thee, whose perfection far excelled
Hers in all real dignity: adorned
She was indeed, and lovely to attract
They love, not thy subjection… (X.145-153)

Like Adam, Samson’s perfection “far excelled” that of Delila’s, for she not only was an idolater according to the Hebrew people, but she was also a woman, and therefore inherently imperfect and subject to man. The Chorus recognizes this shortcoming of woman as well: “Is it for that such outward ornament / Was lavish’t on thir Sex, that inward gifts / Were left for haste unfinish’t, judgment scant, / Capacity not raise’d to apprehend / Or value what is best / In choice, but oftest to affect the wrong (1025-1030)? Further, like Adam, Samson became enchanted by a woman and allowed himself to become subject to her, overturning the hierarchy of power that should be God over man, man over woman.

Samson is also captive of God, and God’s plans. Samson was a gift to his parents, who could not conceive a child on their own, in order to free the Hebrew people from the Philistines. Samson’s responsibility is to his people and to his God and by allowing himself to be overthrown and taken prisoner by those he is supposed to slay, he has shirked his duties. This is his final captivity, and one that he must embrace and accept before death, though this captivity is one of service to God and not of to man, be it the Philistines or to women. Samson reawakens to his calling, slowly, through the visitations of his father, his wife, and a giant who refuses his challenge:

But come what will, my deadliest foe will prove
My speediest friend, by death to rid me hence,
The worst that he can give, to me the best.
Yet so it may fall out, because thir end
Is hate, not help to me, it may with mine
Draw thir own ruin who attempt the deed. (1262-1267)

At the end of the poem Samson accepts that to be a man in the fallen world is a life of captivity be it captivity to sin, women, slavery, senses or captivity in service to God. It is, however, within man’s power to decide what they will be captive to, and that is when Samson reaffirms his service to God, killing the Philistinian Lords:

Be of good courage, I begin to feel
Some rousing motions in me which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts…
If there be aught of presage in the mind,
This day will be remarkable in my life
By some great act, or of my days the last. (1381-1383, 1387-1389)

Captivity in this post-lapsarian world is can be chosen, and what man chooses to be captive to determines his end, be it in shame or in heroism. Samson, because he chose ultimately to be captive to God, became a hero and is remembered to this day for his feats in saving the Hebrew people. Though captivity can deprive man of his gifts, it can also give him strength, depending on the captivity he chooses.

ENL 168: "'Hurt Hawks' and the Balance of Man and Nature"

Jolene P. Brown

Dr. A. Williamson

English 168

5 June 2009

“Hurt Hawks” and the Balance of Man and Nature

Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Hurt Hawks” tells the tragic story of a speaker who finds and cares for an injured hawk. The hawk is wounded beyond healing, and the speaker watches as the hawk fights a battle with pain and death, yet somehow maintains life for six weeks before the speaker takes it upon himself to kill it out of mercy. The hawk, a symbol of strength, is weakened by the wing’s injury, and though the injury does not kill the hawk, it deprives it of its freedom since the hawk can no longer fly. The hawk is forced to wait for a slow, painful death since it will not be killed off by a predator as it can still defend itself with its talons. The reader watches as the speaker is driven to do the one thing he would rather not do: kill the hawk to save it from a fate worse than death; ending the agonizing depletion of strength from a creature that is the embodiment of that characteristic.

There are two parts to the poem, the first that outlines the hawks fall from grace, and the second that describes death and transcendence of nature beyond the death of the hawk. The speaker describes the sad state of the hawk in gruesome detail, describing the “clotted shoulder,” with “the bone too shattered for mending” (lines 1, 20). In the first part the hawk is shown to be both physically and psychologically injured as described in lines 7-8: “at night he remembers freedom / And flies in a dream, the dawn ruins it.” The speaker endows the hawk with a memory of the freedom he once had in the sky, a freedom that has been stripped from him by his crushed wing that simultaneously crushed his spirit. However, the hawk will not submit to humility as “no one but death the redeemer will humble that head” (11) and throughout the pain maintains his arrogance. This arrogance will not get him a quicker death, notes the speaker, since “The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those / That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant” (13-14). The first part describes an arrogant animal that will not submit death or humility, not even for a quicker death, and the speaker mourns the potential lost in the strength that once was.

The second part of the poem describes the continued decline of the hawk leading up to his eventual death at the hands of the remorseful speaker. The pain that the hawk endures is matched only by that of the speaker, who would “sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk” (18). The speaker does all that can be done, feeding it and allowing it the freedom to wander over the landscape outside of a cage. For six weeks, the speaker says, “He wandered over the foreland hill” only to return “in the evening, asking for death, / Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old / Implacable arrogance” (22-23). Even in his weakest moment the hawk maintains his arrogance, not even willing to beg for the death that he needs to leave behind the suffering of his crushed wing and subsequent confinement to land. The speaker describes the bullet as a “gift” which he gives to the hawk in the twilight of the evening, and the sound of the gun triggering a relaxing fall of “Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers” but also a soaring of “the night-herons by the flooded river” that “cried fear at its rising” (25-26). There is, then, both a rising and falling at the end of the poem: as the hawk falls into death, life continues on as other birds rise in life “before it [the hawk] was quite unsheathed from reality” (27).

There is an unusual word that occurs in the poem on line 10 that can be interpreted in several different ways with each interpretation giving new meaning to the passage.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At a distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. (Lines 9-14)

The word “curs,” seems at first to be a typo, or some kind of error on the part of speaker or poet. However, analyzing the use of the word in the line through context, the word could be replaced by either ‘course’ or ‘curse.’ Each word would give a dramatic interpretation to the sentence in which it is employed. In the use of the word ‘course,’ the time that passes through the day, and the general course of events from the moment the sun rises to the next sunrise becomes a torment to the bird, that must suffer each moment without his wing. It also implies the course of suffering the bird must endure, through the shock of the injury, the pain and the realization and acceptance of the inevitability of death. When the word ‘curse’ is used instead, the day is personified: cursing the hawk either with the injury itself, with prolonged life despite the injury, or both. Both words help to express the hawk’s and the speaker’s unhappiness at the injury which is only made worse by the potential that the hawk once had. Further, the incapacity of the current state when compared to the former strength, freedom and arrogance, is even worse than the pain. The current state is a tragedy in the truest sense since all the potential is lost as the hawk must continue the course of pain and incapacity, and suffer the curse of incapacity without the immediate release death.

The hawk is a symbol of strength: “The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, / The wing trails like a banner in defeat” (1-2). In the first line the speaker refers to the wing as a “pillar,” the source of architectural strength, and the metaphor is changed in the second line as the reader is told of the injury; suddenly the pillar is a “banner in defeat.” It is clear that the battle has ended for the hawk as not even the “cat nor coyote / Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons” (4-5) The implication is that the hawk still has the ability to fend off predators, but the predators will not do the hawk the honor of fighting him, since there is other meat to be had. The value that the hawk has as a warrior with honor is suddenly that which will keep him from dying, and ultimately is the same honor that will prevent him a swift warrior’s death. His honor is then lost with the injury as he is valueless even to predators as food.

The tone of the poem is affected a great deal by the poet’s use of free verse combined with long lines. The poem becomes more of a story, as the reader can imagine being told this story by someone who has experienced it first-hand, and it becomes a more personal experience for the reader. Consonance is used more in the first part of poem giving the reader a constant reminder of the jagged pain of the hawk, and the unsettling feeling experienced by the speaker. The word ‘strong’ is used twice in line 9 emphasizing the importance of strength to the creature and how the speaker admires this quality in the hawk. In the second part of the poem, assonance is the emphasis with descriptions such as “implacable arrogance” (24), “eyed with the old” (23), which soothes the ear in preparation for the death to come. There is still consonance, however, and the contrast between the two maintains an uncertain tone leading to a repetition of ‘r’ sounds in the last two lines allowing for a sound of closure at the end of the poem.

The poem is representative of the relationship between man and nature. The title itself implies a larger scope of meaning, since the word “hawks” in the title implies a plurality that does not exist in the poem. This absence generously opens the scope of the interpretation to metaphor applying itself easily to nature. The hawk as a symbol for nature embodies all those characteristics important for the survival of all creatures: strength, honor, glory, arrogance and grace but these things are not permanent and can be lost quickly, without warning. The poem makes no mention of how the hawk was injured, this cause itself is irrelevant to the point the poet is trying to make. The injury weakens the bird, but does not strip it of all its qualities since it can still defend itself from predators and arrogantly defy death. It takes the work of man to allow the creature passage into a world without pain, but even the death of the hawk cannot put a stop to nature as the flock of birds react to the sound of the gift-bullet and take to the sky. The fall of one bird leading to the rise of an entire flock: in helping with death there is a birth of life.

Works Cited

Jeffers, Robinson. “Hurt Hawks.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2, third edition. Editors: Jahan Rmazanin, et. al. W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 2003. Pages 416-417.