Above the faith of wedlock-bands; my tomb
With odours visited and annual flowers."

The scheme of "Samson Agonistes" is that of the Greek drama, the only
one appropriate to an action of such extreme simplicity, admitting so
few personages, and these only as foils to the hero. It is, but for its
Miltonisms of style and autobiographic and political allusion, just such
a drama as Sophocles or Euripides would have written on the subject, and
has all that depth of patriotic and religious sentiment which made the
Greek drama so inexpressibly significant to Greeks. Consummate art is
shown in the invention of the Philistine giant, Harapha, who not only
enriches the meagre action, and brings out strong features in the
character of Samson, but also prepares the reader for the catastrophe.
We must say reader, for though the drama might conceivably be acted with
effect on a Court or University stage, the real living theatre has been
no place for it since the days of Greece. Milton confesses as much when
in his preface he assails "the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff
with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar
persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in
without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people." In his view
tragedy should be eclectic; in Shakespeare's it should be all embracing.
Shelley, perhaps, judged more rightly than either when he said: "The
modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy is undoubtedly an
extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in 'King
Lear,' universal, ideal, and sublime." On the whole, "Samson Agonistes"
is a noble example of a style which we may hope will in no generation be
entirely lacking to our literature, but which must always be exotic,
from its want of harmony with the more essential characteristics of our
tumultous, undisciplined, irrepressible national life.

In one point of view, however, "Samson Agonistes" deserves to be
esteemed a national poem, pregnant with a deeper allusiveness than has
always been recognized. Samson's impersonation of the author himself can
escape no one. Old, blind, captive, helpless, mocked, decried, miserable
in the failure of all his ideals, upheld only by faith and his own
unconquerable spirit, Milton is the counterpart of his hero. Particular
references to the circumstances of his life are not wanting: his bitter
self-condemnation for having chosen his first wife in the ca