classics digests, reflections and reviews
Samson Shorn All mortals I excell’d, and great in hopes With youthful courage and magnanimous thoughts Of birth from Heav’n foretold and high exploits, Full of divine instinct, after some proof Of acts indeed heroic, far beyond The Sons of Anac, famous now and blaz’d, Fearless of danger, like a petty God I walk’d about admir’d of all and dreaded On hostile ground, none daring my affront. Then swoll’n with […]
Read moreA passage in Book 3 where Milton laments his blindness reminds me of the suicide speech of Sophocles’ Ajax. Such is the power of poetry, which made me realize for the first time, that blindness is death, spiritual blindness in particular. Milton uses the same metaphor more explicitly in Samson Agonistes. Ajax But you, Sweet gleam of daylight now before my eyes, And Sun-God, splendid charioteer, I greet you For […]
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