Odd Couplings: Hercules and Oedipus in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes

Milton’s final volume of poetry, Paradise Regain’d … to which is Added Samson Agonistes, has often been taken as his “last word,” or as Arthur Barker wryly called it, “The Conclusions of the Miltonic Effort.”¹ The resemblance between Milton himself and the heroes of both works, especially the blind, failed revolutionary Samson, makes it hard not to read the double volume as a statement of his political and religious beliefs, and especially his response to the revolution and Restoration. The poems are often assumed to offer us exemplary models for action in either the passive resistance of the Son, or the revolutionary defiance of Samson. The problem, however, has been how to reconcile the withdrawn and self-sacrificing Christ who rejects all temptation and, indeed, action with the violent and furious national hero Samson, who goes out in a spectacular bloodbath.² The awkward title itself seems to drive a wedge between the two works, emphasizing their distance from each other, even as they are yoked together for the press. The pair can seem a very odd couple; William Riley Parker, therefore, complains that, “To move, in the 1671 volume, from Book IV of Paradise Regained on to the Preface of Samson Agonistes is to encounter intellectual confusion.”³

Fortunately, one critic’s confusion is always another’s opportunity. While Parker finds the volume incoherent, Joseph Wittreich argues that we need to read it as one single poem, consisting of two parts related in “dialectical opposition” that comment on and interpret each other.⁴ There are many links between the two works. As Wittreich notes, “each poem is an echo chamber for the other.”⁵ While very different kinds of heroes, Samson and Christ are identified through biblical typology. Both poems are tightly focused and unified in terms of character, action, plot, time, and place. Structurally their stories are parallel, as each revolves around a series of debates or temptations through which an isolated hero tries to figure out the meaning of his life, specifically how he may fulfill his prophesied destiny as a savior. As Wittreich and others have pointed out, the double structure of the collection complements that of the 1645 Poems and fits Milton’s tendency to pair poems and, within poems themselves, to organize figures into contrasting types; thus, within the individual works in the 1671 volume, the Son is opposed by Satan, and Samson by Manoa, Dalila, and Harapha. The contrast between the heroes of the individual works creates a further debate on the nature and meaning of heroic action through the juxtaposition of “opposed models of behavior: Samson, the vengeful exponent of the Old Law, and the Son who offers the way of self-sacrifice instead of revenge.”⁶

The debate over heroism appears also at the level of classical allusions that point to the unity underlying this double volume. While in Paradise Regained 4.285–364 Jesus rejects the classical learning that will inform Milton’s tragedy, his defeat of Satan at the end of the poem is described through a complex simile in which

    Satan smitten with amazement fellAs when Earths Son Antæus (to compareSmall things with greatest) in Irassa stroveWith Joves Alcides and oft foil’d still rose,Receiving from his mother Earth new strength,Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joyn’d,Throttl’d at length in the Air, expir’d and fell; So after many a foil the Tempter proud,Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his prideFell whence he stood to see his Victor fall.And as that Theban Monster that propos’dHer riddle, and him, who solv’d it not, devour’d;That once found out and solv’d, for grief and spightCast herself headlong from th’Ismenian steep,So strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend.⁷

The comparison of Satan to Antaeus and the Sphinx unleashes the stories of Heracles/Hercules and Oedipus, which then seem to spill over and indeed flood Samson Agonistes, whose opening is based on that of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus and...