Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.

COMMENTS

The monologue of Prometheus reproduced here lifts the curtain on the drama. It is at once a lament and defiance, thence its peculiar tragic energy. It expresses endurance stretched to breaking-point and yet an uncrushed spirit and stubborn will. The fallen Titan speaks of unutterable pain, but that very pain makes him "more glorious far" than Zeus, his enemy and executioner.

Prometheus is depicted as chained to a rock over a precipice. All around are icy cliffs, ravines and mountain peaks. Above is the sky, below is the sea. It is a majestic, breathtaking landscape, as grand as the feelings actuating the suffering Titan. The style, naturally, matches the grandeur of feeling and scenery. Shelley's model is Milton whom he never tired of praising in prose and in verse (see The Defence of Poetry and the fragment Milton's Spirit). Milton had also chosen a cosmic subject, originating in myth (biblical myth, in the elder poet's case), and had sung a battle waged against God, the king of kings. His hero, too, was a rebel. But as a loyal Christian Milton censured the rebellious spirit of his Satan, which Shelley certainly could never do. Incidentally, he affirmed that the rebek is far more attractive in Milton's epic than God. Needless to say that this is much more the case in Shelley's drama.

Shelley uses Milton's (and Shakespeare's) blank verse: its freedom, its long pentameter lines with their sweeping strides have made it a favourable vehicle for meditative, philosophical or otherwise lofty poetry (cf. Wordsworth's Prelude and also Byron's Manfred and Cain, to quote but the most obvious examples). Shelley's blank verse differs radically from Milton's in being immune from Latin influence, from Milton's favourite inversions, such as post-substantival position of adjectives, and in making more ample use of enjambment and, consequently, in being freer in its movement.

The monologue begins with an apostrophe to Zeus, − extended, elaborate, including several specifications of its object. Prometheus then proceeds to list the crimes of Zeus against humanity. He has forced men to give him "knee-worship, prayer, and praise, / And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts" and the reward they have won is summed up in a line heavy with bitterness, for the reward is "fear and self-contempt and barren hope". The sad lot of mankind is unexpectedly and nobly contrasted to the happy lot of the Titan. He declares that he is the one who reigns and triumphs; his suffering is his empire; the stronger the one, the greater the other ("torture and solitude, / scorn and despair, − these are mine empire").

Through these words of unconquerable pride cries of pain break ("Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!"). Titan and hero he may be, but he is human too, and this is Shelley's way of bringing him closer to the world of ordinary men. The extract quoted above ends with Prometheus invoking the elements as witnesses to his agony. He is well aware he could put an instant end to it all. Nothing is required but recantation; nothing short of capitulation will do. And that is a moral impossibility.

The conflict, it would seem then, is moral and spiritual; the scene, the action, the "personae" belong equally to the sphere of imagination − or myths, which amounts to the same thing. But there is in that monologue a high concentration of physically concrete poetic details and imagery that give a convincing reality to abstract moral problems. In the two lines:

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1056