Paradise Lost: The Arguments - WW Norton & Company

Samson Agonistes 7
Of wisdom? Vast, unwieldy, burdensome,
Proudly secure, 8 yet liable to fall 55
By weakest subtleties; not made to rule,
But to subserve where wisdom bears command.
God, when he gave me strength, to show withal
How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair.
But peace! I must not quarrel with the will 60
Of highest dispensation, 9 which herein
Haply had ends above my reach to know.
Suffices that to me strength is my bane,
And proves the source of all my miseries,
So many, and so huge, that each apart 65
Would ask a life to wail. But, chief of all,
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, 1 to me is extinct, 70
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, 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 75
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors or without, still as a fool,
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, 80
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,”
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree? 2
85
The sun to me is dark
8. Confident, free from care (Latin securus).
9. Providence.
1. God’s first (“prime”) act in creating the world was to say “Let there be light” (Genesis 1.3), a phrase Milton
paraphrases below.
2. I.e., why am I thus deprived of the first-created (and most important) thing?