Designed for great exploits, if I must die
Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out,
Made of my enemies the scorn and gaze,

To grind in brazen fetters under task

With this heaven-gifted strength? O glorious strength,
Put to the labour of a beast, debased

Lower than bond-slave! Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver!
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,
Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke.
Yet stay; let me not rashly call in doubt
Divine prediction. What if all foretold
Had been fulfilled but through mine own default?
Whom have I to complain of but myself,
Who this high gift of strength committed to me,
In what part lodged, how easily bereft me,
Under the seal of silence could not keep,
But weakly to a woman must reveal it,
O'ercome with importunity and tears?
O impotence of mind in body strong !
But what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom? Vast, unwieldy, burdensome,
Proudly secure, yet liable to fall

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
Of highest dispensation, 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
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,

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Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,

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
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,
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?
The sun to me is dark

And silent as the moon,

When she deserts the night,

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,

And almost life itself, if it be true

That light is in the soul,

She all in every part, why was the sight

To such a tender ball as the eye confined,

So obvious and so easy to be quenched,
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,

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But made nereby obnoxious more

To all the miseries of life,

Life in captivity

Among inhuman foes.

But who are these? for with joint pace I near
The tread of many feet steering this way;
Perhaps my enemies, who come to stare
At my affliction, and perhaps to insult-
Their daily practice to afflict me more.

Chor. This, this is he; softly a while;
Let us not break in upon him.

O change beyond report, thought, or belief!
See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused,
With languished head unpropped,

As one past hope, abandoned,

And by himself given over,

In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds

O'er worn and soiled.

Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he,

That heroic, that renowned,

Irresistible Samson? whom, unarmed,

No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast, could withstand; Who tore the lion as the lion tears the kid;

Ran on embattled armies clad in iron,

And, weaponless himself,

Made arms ridiculous, useless the forgery

Of brazen shield and spear, the hammered cuirass,
Chalybean-tempered steel, and frock of mail

Adamantean proof:

But safest he who stood aloof,

When insupportably his foot advanced,

In scorn of their proud arms and warlike tools,

Spurned them to death by troops. The bold Ascalonite
Fled from his lion ramp; old warriors turned

Their plated backs under his heel,

Or grovelling soiled their crested helmets in the dust.
Then with what trivial weapon came to hand,

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The jaw of a dead ass, his sword of bone,

A thousand foreskins fell, the flower of Palestine,

In Ramath-lechi, famous to this day :

Then by main force pulled up, and on his shoulders bore,

The gates of Azza, post and massy bar,

Up to the hill by Hebron, seat of giants old,

No journey of a sabbath day, and loaded so;

Like whom the Gentiles feign to bear up Heaven.
Which shall I first bewail-

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Thy bondage or lost sight

Prison within prison

Inseparably dark?

Thou art become (O worst imprisonment !)

The dungeon of thyself; thy soul

(Which men enjoying sight oft without cause complain)

Imprisoned now indeed,

In real darkness of the body dwells,

Shut up from outward light

To incorporate with gloomy night;

For inward light, alas!

Puts forth no visual beam.

O mirror of our fickle state,
Since man on earth, unparalleled,

The rarer thy example stands,

By how much from the top of wondrous glory,

Strongest of mortal men,

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To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen.
For him I reckon not in high estate

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Whom long descent of birth,

Or the sphere of fortune, raises;

But thee, whose strength, while virtue was her mate,

Might have subdued the earth,

Universally crowned with highest praises.

Sams. I hear the sound of words; their sense the air

Dissolves unjointed ere it reach my ear.

Chor. He speaks: let us draw nigh. Matchless in might, The glory late of Israel, now the grief!