John Milton(1608–1674)
From Samson Agonistes
From Samson Agonistes''
But peace, I must not quarrel with the will
Of highest dispensation,1 which herein
Haply 0 had ends above my reach to know:perhaps
Suffices that to me strength is my bane,2
And proves the source of all my miseries,
So many, and so huge, that each apart,
Would ask 0 a life to wail; but chief of all,need
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,
And all her various objects of delight
Annull'd, 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
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong.
Within doors, or without, still 0 as a foolalways
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,
Irrecoverably 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;3
Why am I thus bereaved 0 thy prime decreerobbed of
The sun to me is dark
And silent as the moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.4
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the soul,
She5 all in every part; why was the sight
To such a tender ball as th' eye confined,
So obvious 0 and so easy to be quench'd,exposed
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,
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,
But made hereby obnoxious 0 moreexposed
To all the miseries of life,
Life in captivity
Among inhuman foes.
1647-70?1671