FAMOUS PLAYWRIGHT POET AND OTHERS
THE POETRY OF JOHN MILTON
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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He experiences some “rousing motions” which might be from God.
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Manoa convinces him to do it or the Philistines will execute Samson.
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The Chorus demands he stay in his prison cell and Samson reacts against them.
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He wishes to see Dalila one last time in the crowd.
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Detailed explanation-1: -By the end of the poem, Samson, through expiation and regeneration, has regained a state of spiritual readiness in order to serve again as God’s champion. The destruction of the Philistines at the temple of Dagon results in more deaths than the sum of all previous casualties inflicted by Samson.
Detailed explanation-2: -Himself blind when he wrote Samson Agonistes, Milton depicts Samson, the once-mighty warrior, as blinded and a prisoner of the Philistines (“eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves”). Samson conquers self-pity and despair, however, and is granted a return of his old strength.
Detailed explanation-3: -Sams. With day-spring born; here leave me to respire. Times past, what once I was, and what am now.
Detailed explanation-4: -Samson Agonistes is unusual among tragedies in that its hero is already fallen at the beginning of the play, rather than, like Oedipus in Oedipus Tyrannus (or Othello, Lear, and Coriolanus), beginning in prosperity and, with a change in fortune, plunged into adversity.