Severed hair from Donne to Pope. (hair symbolisms in the poems of John Donne an Alexander Pope)

The description of Adam and Eve that we are given when we first catch sight of them in Paradise Lost deals almost exclusively with their hair, and its symbolism:

hyacinthine locks Round from his parted forelock manly hung Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad: She as a veil down to the slender waist Her golden unadorned tresses wore Dishevelled, and in wanton ringlets waved As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied Subjection, but required with gentle sway, And by her yielded, by him best received, Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, And sweet reluctant amorous delay.

(IV, 301-11)(1)

Even were it not for the extremely important position that this passage occupies in the narrative (these are the first mortal beings we have yet encountered), the description, particularly of Eve's hair, would call attention to itself by its sly ambiguity. 'Wanton' is one of those words which, when used in a prelapsarian context, implicitly call to mind all the current, fallen connotations by consciously excluding them.(2) Whereas Adam's hair hangs over a line break, but is then cut short by the early caesura ('Clustering,'), Eve's hair goes from being the object of 'wore' to becoming (wantonly) the subject of the next clause (assuming that 'waved' is an active verb paralleling 'curls'). The whole syntax indeed becomes dishevelled and impossible to untangle exactly.

Writing about this passage, a critic has noted that 'Milton's initial portrait of Eve' is 'essentially ambivalent', remarking that 'Curiously, seventeenth century poets tend to vacillate between praise and damnation in their depictions of women's hair'.(3) But it is not just in the seventeenth century that this ambivalence about hair - particularly women's hair - is to be found. Milton himself seems to point us towards his source for this description of Eve's hair: it is not often noted that the six final lines of the passage quoted rhyme abc abc, like the ending of a Petrarchan sonnet. It is perhaps the most extended and complex set of end-rhymes in a poem defiantly set loose from what Milton himself called 'the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming',(4) and its effect here is both to reinforce the sense of entanglement, and to call to mind all those sonnets, in Italian or in English, in which the mistress's hair is compared to a snare, or a forest.(5)

For hair is curious: let a lover adore his mistress's hair never so much, even touch it and kiss it, he would nevertheless be displeased to find a strand of it in his soup. Hair is at once the crowning, most freely-moving and lively part of the body, and also the part of the body which, along with the nails, is technically lifeless, accidental. The spectrum of values which it comes to represent in any age varies considerably, but because of its nature, hair will always evoke an ambivalent reaction. The Victorians, for instance, felt both fascinated and threatened by women with golden hair (much as Milton seems to be). For them, according to Elisabeth Gitter, the hair took on associations similar to those of gold itself, which 'was associated with the unearthly, with the radiance of the sun, with activity of the divine spirit', but also 'with death, dirt, and excrement'.(6) This association of hair with 'excrement' is ancient; through the ages, it is clear, hair has continued to carry with it strong, and strongly opposed, connotations.

But hair has other extraordinary properties besides ambiguity, and one notably which distinguishes it (along with the nails, which do not hold as great a poetical fascination) from the rest of the body. The hair can be cut without doing damage to the body, and without even doing permanent damage to the hair itself, which can grow back. Cutting of hairs is a common event - indeed, for a clean-shaven man like Milton, a daily event - yet in almost all religions and cultures, as well as in secular literature from the time of Homer, the voluntary or forcible cutting off of hair is an extremely significant symbolic act.(7) Milton's Samson comments on the seeming contradiction, that such an easily and commonly cut part of the body as the hair could be, at times, so sacrosanct: 'God, when he gave me strength, to show withal / How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair' (SA, 58-9). Harapha utterly denies that the hair itself can have any real power: thy strength, he tells Samson, thou 'Feign'dst at thy birth was given thee in thy hair, / Where strength can least abide' (1135-6). The very idea of 'strong hair' seems to contain a contradiction.

No doubt it is true that Samson's God, not his hair, is the ultimate source of his strength: his locks are just as long at the beginning of the tragedy as at the end, but they seem to him at first 'redundant locks / Robustious to no purpose' (568-9). Yet at the same time the hair really is imbued with power. Whereas Milton held the fruit of the forbidden tree to be an example of positive, rather than natural law - that is, it did not differ in essence from other fruit, but only in the fact that God had decided to forbid its consumption - Milton makes it clear that the rule against Samson's cutting his hair has its basis, at least partially, in the very nature of the hair.(8) So Manoa reminds his son that there is 'strength / Miraculous yet remaining in those locks' (586-7). Samson too is conscious of their power, asking 'Shall I abuse this consecrated gift / Of strength, again returning with my hair / After my great transgression?' (1354-6). Milton thus reminds us that God can choose to lodge his strength in even the weakest and most trivial part of his creation. But he also tells us that although hair seems trivial, it can carry great symbolic and actual force - partly because, unlike the apple, once it has been plucked, it can and does regenerate.

Milton was drawing on common associations with hair when he chose to make Samson's hair so essentially ambiguous - imbued with real …