The Biblical account of the Nazarite, Samson, involves three levels of narrative. While it relates the amorous adventures of Samson and the treachery of Dalilah, its central reference is to the superhuman exploits of a hero whose life echoes the epic of Hercules in a neighboring culture. Additionally, Samson and Dalilah (as well as Hercules) behave as celestial deities anthropomorphized. Alfred de Vigny's "La Colère de Samson" virtually suppresses the elements of gigantism and the marvelous to focus on the human passion and pathos that mask a combat of male solar and female lunar principles.

Vigny's troubled liaison with the actress Marie Dorval provoked the poem. There seems no doubt that his passion was intense and that he expected uncompromising affection in return. In this he was cruelly disappointed by Marie's bisexual divagations. No doubt Vigny's own truculence contributed to her disenchantment with a severe and self-righteous companion. Marie's betrayals, her sexual and emotional inconstancy, are an issue in Vigny's transposition of his personal experience to the context of the Samson legend; but Dalilah's relationship with Samson in the poem depends more on political, religious and profit motives. Dalilah is the agent of her people, the Philistines, who are committed to the subversion of a powerful enemy among the Hebrews. She strips Samson of the purity and strength emblematized by his unshorn hair, a mark of the zealot Nazarite. With the shearing of his hair and the implicit loss of masculinity as well as his God-given moral and physical powers, Samson is reduced to impotence and is led away to servitude and death. Dalilah betrays an implied professed love for Samson not so much for the sake of variety in pleasure, Marie's offense, but for personal gain and the benefit of the tribe.

Samson is Vigny as he sees himself—the anguished victim of feminine deceit. In Vigny's poem Samson is the ironic captive of his own love, or more accurately, passion, which is consistent with Jewish tradition that perceives him as allowing sensual pleasure to dominate his conduct. In the poem's central apostrophe Samson acknowledges that man is bred to carnal satisfaction:

L'Homme a toujours besoin de caresse et d'amour;

…..

II rêvera partout à la chaleur du sein,
Aux chansons de la nuit, aux baisers de l'aurore,
A la lèvre de feu que sa lèvre dévore,
Aux cheveux dénoués qui roule sur son front,
Et les regrets du lit, en marchant, le suivront.¹

Although he protests of woman that "c'est le plaisir qu'elle aime…." (1. 66), it is he, himself, who sits bound by the arms of Dalilah, symbolically a prisoner of his own lust. However, beyond his need for woman's "caresses" is Vigny/Samson's need for woman's love. Samson's strength in this text apparently derives fundamentally not from divine anointment but from his presumption of Dalilah's love:

Eternel! Dieu des forts! vous savez que mon âme
N'avait pour aliment que l'amour d'une femme
Puisant dans l'amour seul plus de sainte vigeur
Que mes cheveux divins n'en donnaient à mon coeur.
(11. 81-84)

His blinding at the hands of his captors is the symbolic actualization of his refusal to recognize the truth of her indifference, "Interdire à ses yeux de voir ou de pleurer." (1. 104) It is not the loss of his "cheveux divins" that emasculates him but his final realization that Dalilah's love is false and the fact that he has further expended his powers in repressing his anger and frustration:

Toujours mettre sa force à garder sa colère
Dans son coeur offensé, comme en un sanctuaire
D'où le feu s'échappant irait tout dévoré,
Interdire à ses yeux de voir ou de pleurer,
(II. 101-105)

What restores his strength in captivity is still another irony, his liberation from the need of Dalilah's love and from the need to contain his violent anger at his betrayal. Now "le feu s'échappant irait tout dévoré," (1. 103) and so the pillars of the temple of Dagon are thrust assunder in a cataclysmic demonstration of power restored. A solar fire bursts through the imprisoning bars of night.

While Vigny, in his poem, has personalized the human aspect of Samson and diminished his superhuman dimension, he has, simultaneously, enriched the latent allegory in this material of the rivalry between Night and Day. The poem opens with an exposition of place. In addition to suggesting a topography for the events, characteristics of the physical environment indicate the roles and something of the nature of the protagonists. The "shepherd" (Samson), heroic and solitary, (traits borrowed from the Biblical representation) is associated with lions. (1. 3) The lion's head has from ancient times been a solar icon. The halo of its mane imitates the "rays" of the sun and the tawny color is idealized as golden. Like the sun, the lion is represented as the solitary master of its realm. Hercules, the Greek Samson, with his twelve labors, is an acknowledged solar hero. In the first of his (adult) adventures he slew the lion of Nemea, skinned it and wore its head over his own so that his identity as the sun hero is clearly established in the myth. Samson, also the subject of twelve marvels, first slew a lion. His Hebrew name, "Shimshon," is derived from "Shemesh," the sun. To suggest the simultaneity of Samson, lion and the sun Vigny immediately adds in his introduction: "La nuit n'a pas calmé / La fournaise du jour dont l'air est enflammé." (11. 3-4) Even though envelopped in darkness, an anticipation of Samson's blindness and captivity at the end of the poem, the sun's fierce heat and light and the hero's energy remain immanent. Following the masculine statement of the first four lines—solitude, gritty sand, lions, fiery sun, male courage—the conclusion of the stanza is a feminine modulation:

Un vent léger s'élève à l'horizon et ride
Les flots de la poussière ainsi qu'un lac limpide.
Le lin blanc de la tente est bercé mollement;
L'oeuf d'autruche, allumé, veille paisiblement,
Des voyageurs voilés intérieure étoile,
Et jette longuement deux ombres sur la toile.
(11. 5-10)

A soft wind ruffles the sand like waves on a pool and swells the sides of the tent to create the image of undulating water, a feminine essence. There is a further feminine presence in the liquid "l's" that lull these lines. Finally, to command this dark place there is an ostrich-egg lamp—a miniature moon to epitomize Artemis, lunar goddess or earth mother, who may adopt various guises. Her guise in "La Colère de Samson" is Dalilah, envoy of Dagon, god of vegetation and fertility, and in whose name resonates the Hebrew "laylah"—the night. In a diurnal allegory, Dalilah, sensual spirit of darkness, has seized and encompassed the regent of the day: "ses bras sont liés / aux genoux réunis du maître …" (11. 12-13). The power of night has obscured the brilliant aura of solar majesty. His rays are extinguished (his head is shorn). The "rays" of his vision are destroyed in a bloody sunset and he is imprisoned in darkness where he awaits the restoration of his vigor at the return of day. Vigny has abridged the period of Samson's captivity in the poem (1) in the interests of concentrating dramatic impact, (2) because Dalilah's betrayal of Samson has purged him of his amorous servitude thus immediately restoring his moral and emotional wholeness, and (3) in order to compress the action into one nighttime to enhance the verisimilitude of one single solar cycle of decline and resurrection.

Samson's climactic destruction of the temple of Dagon and the symbolic daybreak is preceded elsewhere in the Biblical account (and alluded to in lines 94-95 of the poem) by another of his adventures which relates to his epic revenge and to his role as solar hero. Once when Samson was dallying with a prostitute in the town of Gaza, his enemies set an ambush for him. He was to be seized and killed at dawn. Somehow learning of the attack Samson forestalled it by uprooting the pillars holding the portals of the city, carrying off the entire gate assembly and installing it high on a hill near Mount Hebron. Dawn for the people of Gaza was signaled when the first rays of the sun entered the gates of the city. Samson had removed the break of day to a new location thus eliminating the trigger of the ambushers' assault. Closeted in this episode with an alter-Dalilah, he breaks out of his nocturnal confinement and brings first light where it falls naturally to high elevation by an act of great strength and violence and so reasserting his hegemony. Samson's explosive resolution of his contest with the Night—a shattering dawn which burst open the pillars of his somber prison—is an elaboration of the Gaza episode.

In the Book of Judges Samson is Shemesh humanized and martyred. Like Hercules, the Hebrew sun-hero comes to a human end and, like Hercules, is the victim of his all too human passions. Vigny knows his own weaknesses, but represents himself in his poem as a martyr of deception and betrayal. The latent allegory of the solar hero, as well as the Biblical reference, dignifies and redeems with a mythic dimension a confession of personal inadequacy.

Notes

¹ Alfred de Vigny, œuvres complètes. Ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Aux Editions du Seuil [L'Intégrale], 1965) 98-99. 11. 39 and 44-48.