The Day of Saints - Day 29, Samson

Jonathan Budd
Oct 25, 2019
3 min read

Saint Sampson with his crozier intact(?)

To me, the Old Testament judge Samson seems far from enigmatic, well-known from Sunday School retellings along with Daniel in that Lion's Den, and Joshua et al marching around Jericho. But Samson of Dol, the Cornish saint is a different 'kettle of fish'.

It was always my intention to visit Samson Island in the Scillies as part of my sabbatical, to legitimately reach to the furthest parts of the county and thereby encompass it. Reading, as I did during September, Simon Armitage's poetic pilgrimage cum travelogue, Walking Away, I was intrigued to find as well as passing through Morwenstow, where I began my own sabbatical, he also headed towards Samson. However, he met a barrier just as he reached the final stretch. Samson eluded him. When I began to make my own preparation to visit, I found a similar issue. I rang the Tourist Information office on the islands and was told that only a few boats risk the visit during the year because it involves a difficult beach landing, and was weather dependent. I might arrive and find it impossible to make the final stretch having spent a fair amount of money and effort to get that far. I reluctantly admitted defeat.

Visiting Alternun, weeks later, I found in the graveyard outside St Nonna's a tombstone marked with the name Samson Pearn. I thought at the time it might be the closest I would ever get to Samson. However, with some more reading I found that in Golant there is a church dedicated to St Samson, and so this week I travelled down the county to explore.

The church was lovely, and Samson was there in the stained glass and giving his name to a well outside of the church, but I still sensed a distance. I took my photographs, bought a postcard or two and moved on. Back at home, I read in translation the lengthy Via Sancti Samonis (a Life of Saint Samson - readable here: https://web.archive.org/web/20100916040115/http://www.lamp.ac.uk/celtic/elibrary/translations/samson.htm ), yet although it revealed snippets, despite its considerable length (32 pages of A4!), it still left me feeling I was not engaged with his story. I sat and tried to write a poem but it was like a blank wall on the blank page.

Eventually, I turned to a form I had dismissed as too short to use, the haiku, but found as I took the snippets from the Via that caught my eye, that something emerged.

Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled says of haiku that it is commonly structured as three lines with 5-7-5 syllables. Also it is good form to reference a season of the year or weather, and a pun is desirable (my eyes lit up!). The snippets I took are:

1. That Samson had a bishop's crozier (aka 'crook') from which jewels were stolen - the thief later, when fleeing, ran on to ice and sank through to his death leaving a cloak on the surface from which the jewels were recovered,

2. That Samson was very abstemious, eating perhaps only once every two or three days, no alcohol, little sleep etc. I wondered whether he was missing out on something by the extremes of this! There is also a reference to the well as a pun on spring.

3. That the name Samson literally means 'Man of the Sun', and with stories of him subduing serpants (in my mind hot breathed dragons!), I pictured him as having a peace rather than the rage of his Biblical antecedent namesake.

4. That at one point someone attempted to poison him but knowing this, and remembering a verse of scripture that promises protection in such circumstance he drank it and came to no harm. I have taken this in a different direction towards hope in the face of death. (Incidentally, I was very amused at the ominous 'turtle stove' in the church, used from 19th C until the 1980s to heat the church - its inscription seemed to be rather Dantean; hell as inferno!)