“Cracked Across”: Blake, Milton, and the Noise of History

Abstract

For Joseph Wittreich ... he stood, as one who pray'd, Or some great matter in his mind revolv'd. --Samson Agonistes, 1637-38 when I was on the Other Side, I received no instructions. Guide pressed me, and when I was about to enter trance I would pray to be given an order to give [the church], so they could take action. I wanted this so much, and I prayed as I went into trance, and it was all quite painful and trying. In the end when I returned, completely spent, the message that Guide heard me and reworked into ordinary language told them neither to take action nor to desist. --Patron, in Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault (1999; English trans., 2003; second emphasis mine) GIVEN BLAKE'S ENDURING PASSION FOR MILTON, IT IS REMARKABLE THAT he never illustrated Samson Agonistes. Over many years he visualized every other major work of Milton's except Lycidas, and some texts (such as the Nativity Ode and Paradise Lost) he illustrated multiply and variously. The dramatic poem's omission becomes even more puzzling when we consider that Blake did execute several paintings on the Samson cycle the Book of Judges, including Samson Pulling Down the Temple mentioned by William Rossetti, now regrettably lost. On the rare occasions when Blake does link one of his images to Samson Agonistes, he does so obliquely. Around 1804 he inscribed caption beneath the famous rose print, the figure of youthful exuberance he had first sketched almost twenty-five years earlier (fig. 1). Rising from where he labourd at the Mill Slaves, Albion clearly recalls Milton's Samson, Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill slaves, (1) but the relationship between image and source text is by no means clear and has led Blake scholars to strikingly different conclusions. David Erdman, for instance, was convinced that this naked youth expresses the collective political spirit of the American Revolution and the Gordon Riots; properly understood as a terrific social utterance, rose provides Erdman's Prophet Against Empire its first corrective lesson in how to read Blake historically. Others have suggested the picture is more personal, representing either the renewed ecstatic visions Blake experienced after returning Felpham to London in 1803 or the artistic freedom he desired after many years of being mired in the drudgery of commercial copywork. (2) The image that lies closest to Milton's Samson at the pillars is the last of the 537 watercolors Blake prepared for an illustrated version of Edward Young's Night Thoughts (fig. 2), where his representation of an open-eyed Samson directly contradicts the biblical narrative and instead echoes Milton's description of Samson with inward eyes illuminated (1689). But despite its oblique, secondary reference to Samson Agonistes, this picture primarily refers to the final, apocalyptic lines of Young's poem: like Him of Gaza in his Wrath, / Plucking the Pillars that support the World. (3) Samson Agonistes sneaks in under cover, leaving us again to wonder why Blake never illustrated it directly. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] The absence of direct visual representation by no means indicates that Milton's tragedy was unimportant to Blake. In fact, I believe it indicates the opposite. Blake was haunted by Samson Agonistes, especially by Samson at the pillars, and he returned to that moment almost obsessively. He never represents it directly because he Cannot; that is, he cannot form that moment into unified image or series that would achieve comprehensive interpretation of the dramatic poem, as his other illustrations of Milton's poetry brashly attempt to do. Despite Manoa's concluding promise to build his son monument, Samson Agonistes leaves its reader heap of ruins, tangled wreckage of bodies and building, and the poem likewise enters into Blake's work in collapse, as multitude of fragments we can view only serially and collectively, in pieces, but never unified into single whole. …