to Jupiter, as a sufferer under tyranny because of his love of mankind, the scene of his torture on the mountain side over the sea, the attendance of sea nymphs in the chorus, the herald Mercury, the vulture, and the insistence on the violent elements of nature, earthquake, lightning and whirlwind, in the imagery, are common to both poems; but Shelley by his treatment has so modified all these as to recreate them. The ethical motive of Shelley, his allegorical meanings, his metaphysical suggestions, the development of the old and introduction of new characters, the conduct of the action, the interludes of pastoral, music and landscape, the use of new imaginary beings neither human nor divine, and the conception of universal nature, totally transform the primitive Eschylean myth; and in its place arises the most modern poem of the century by virtue of its being the climax of the Revolution, in imaginative literature, devoted to the ideal of democracy as a moral force. The crude Eschylean matter may be easily traced in the following notes in detail. The interpretation of the modern poem is more difficult, and may be studied in the essays of Rossetti in the Shelley Society Publications, Todhunter's A Study of Shelley, Thomson's Notes, in the Athenæum, 1881, and Miss Scudder's Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, as well as in numerous biographies and essays. I am unable to follow these commentators in giving more precise meaning to the characters and the plot than is contained in Shelley's and Mrs. Shelley's exposition already cited in the Head-note to the poem, and the preface, supplemented by the statements of the text itself. Prometheus may be the Human Mind,' Ione 'Hope' and Panthea Faith,' and the Semichoruses of Act II. sc. ii. may represent respectively the passage of Love and Faith [Asia and Panthea] through the sphere of the Senses of the Emotions . of the Reason and Will, and so on; but that Shelley had any conscious logic of this sort in his poem seems too uncertain to be asserted. The drama is an emanation of his imagination, working out his deepest sentiments and convictions in a form nearer to the power of music than language ever before achieved; it is haunted by the presence of the inexpressible in the heart of its most transcendent imagery; and in all its moods and motions is far from the domain in which the prose of articulated thought is discerned through a veil of figured phrase. The intellectual skeleton, in any case, even were it discoverable, is not the soul of the poem. Certain theories of Shelley, as to philosophical problems, are present in the verse; but they control only instinctively, and not by deliberate thought, the structure of character, scene, event, and act. They are noted below. Page 165. Dramatis Persona. Prometheus, the Titan, bound to the icy precipice, suffers this punishment from Jupiter as a consequence of the gift of fire and other benefits to mankind. Jupiter is the supreme of living things,' of whom Prometheus says, 'I gave all he has,' and 'O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power, and my own will.' Prometheus possesses the secret which may transfer the sceptre of wide heaven' from Jupiter, and refuses to divulge it. The knowledge that the reign of Jupiter will end sustains him in his torture, which has now lasted for many centuries. Asia, a sea nymph, daughter of Oceanus, is the beloved of Prometheus, and separated from him in India. Panthea is the messenger between the two; Ione is her companion; both are sisters of Asia. Demogorgon is the child of Jupiter who overthrows his father, at the appointed time, as Jupiter had dethroned Saturn; the foreknowledge of this is the secret of Prometheus. The other persons of the drama have little or no part in the action, and are easily comprehended. The obvious allegorical meaning of these greater characters can be briefly stated. Prometheus is a type of mankind suffering under the oppression of the evil of the world. Jupiter is this incarnate tyranny conceived primarily in a broadly political rather than in any moral sense, the one name of many shapes' already described in THE REVOLT OF ISLAM. Asia is, in Mrs. Shelley's words, the same as Venus and Nature,' or essentially the Aphrodite of Lucretius humanized by Shelley's imagination and recreated as the life of nature animated by the spirit of love. The separation of Prometheus from Asia during the reign of Jupiter typifies the discordance between man and nature due to the tyranny of convention, custom, institutions, laws, and all the arbitrary organization of society, - one of the cardinal ideas inherited by Shelley from eighteenth century thought. The fall of Jupiter, which is the abolition of human law, is followed by the triumph of love, in which man and nature are once more in accord; this accord is presented doubly in the drama as the marriage of Prometheus, and the regeneration of the world in millennial happiness. For the interpretation of Demogorgon, Panthea, and the various spirits, see below. The references to Eschylus are to Paley's third edition, London, 1870. Page 165. Act I. Scene i. The landscape setting of the Act is Eschylean, and borrows some details from the Greek, but as mountain scenery it is Alpine and directly studied from nature. Shelley's Journal, March 26, 1818, gives a special instance of it, describing Les Echelles: 'The rocks, which cannot be less than a thousand feet in perpendicular height, sometimes overhang the road on each side, and almost shut out the sky. The scene is like that described in the Prometheus of Eschylus vast rifts and caverns in the granite precipices; wintry mountains with ice and snow above; the loud sounds of unseen waters within the caverns, and walls of toppling rocks, only to be scaled as he describes, by the winged chariot of the ocear nymphs.' I. 2 One, Prometheus. I. 23. Cf. Eschylus, 98-100. I. 58. The pity of Prometheus for Jupiter and his wish to recall the curse formerly pronounced mark the moral transformation of the character from that conceived by Eschylus. This is the point of departure from the ancient myth, which is here left behind. Shelley thus clothes Prometheus with the same ideal previously depicted in Laon, the spiritual power of high-minded and forgiving endurance of wrong, the opposition of love to force, the victory of the higher nature of man in its own occult and inherent right. It appears to me that this perfecting of Prometheus through suffering, so that he lays aside his hate of Jupiter for pity, shown in his repentance for the curse and his withdrawal of it, is the initial point of the action of the drama and marks the appointed time for the overthrow of the tyrant. The fulfilment of the moral ideal in Prometheus is the true cause of the end of the reign of evil, though this is dramatically brought about by the instrumentality of Demogorgon. In this opening speech, and in the remainder of the drama, it is unnecessary to point out the echoes of English poets. It is enough to observe generally, once for all, that Milton and Shakespeare have displaced Wordsworth and Coleridge as sources of phrase and tone, though they have not entirely excluded them, especially the latter; just as Plato has displaced Godwin and the eighteenth century philosophers in the intellectual sphere, though here again without entirely excluding them. I. 74. The dramatic choruses constructed of responding voices, both in Shelley and in Byron, go back to the witch choruses of Macbeth; but they may be more immediately derived from Coleridge's Fire, Famine, and Slaughter. I. 132 whisper, the inorganic voice' of the earth. I. 137 And love, i. e., dost love (Swinburne). Forman conjectures I love; Rossetti, and Jove. I. 140. Cf. Eschylus, 321. I. 150 tongue, the earth has apparently two voices, that of the dialogue and the inorganic voice' above, which is the same as the language of the dead' above (cf. I. 183) and the tongue known only to those who die' in this line. I. 165 et seq. Cf. Eschylus, 1064-1070, for parallel imagery; but the passage recalls especially the sorrow of Demeter after the rape of Persephone and the woes then visited on the earth in the classic myth. I. 192 et seq. Zoroaster. The story is not known to Zoroastrian literature. The conception of the double world of shades and forms, with the reunion of the two after death, seems original with Shelley, suggested by the notion of Plato's world of ideas. I. 262 et seq. Cf. Eschylus, 1010-1017. I. 289 robe. The reference is to the shirt of Nessus. I. 296. Cf. Eschylus, 936-940. I. 328. The detail is borrowed from the action of Apollo in Eschylus, Eumenides, 170. The character of Mercury is developed by including in his mood the pity shown by Hyphæstos in the PROMETHEUS. The Furies are in character, description, and language, Shelley's creation. 1. 345. The reference is to Dante, Inferno, ix. I. 451. The idea is Platonic, and frequent in Shelley. Cf. below, II. iv. 83 and PRINCE ATHANASE, II. 2. I. 458. Cf. Eschylus, 218; THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, VIII. ix.-x., xxi. I. 471. The ethical doctrine that each sin brings its own penalty of necessity, and essentially is its own punishment, is involved in the image that the Furies are shapeless in themselves. I. 484. The intimacy of remorse in the soul is partly indicated by the expressions used. The nature of the suffering brought by sin is most truly conceived and presented in what the Furies say of themselves throughout the scene. The idea, however, is confused by the addition of the element of the evil nature active within the soul and assailing it. The two notions are not incompatible, but the second has little pertinence to Prometheus here. I. 490. The case illustrated, for example, in Tennyson's Lucretius. I. 547. The torture of Prometheus, as was indicated by the speeches of the Furies, ceases to be physically rendered, and becomes mental. He is shown two visions of the defeat of good, first the Crucifixion, second, the French Revolution; the lesson the Furies draw is the folly of Prometheus in having opened the higher life for man, since it entails the greater misery the more he aspires, and is doomed at each supreme effort to increase rather than alleviate the state of man (cf. I. 595-597). The torture inflicted by the Furies, as well as the description of their methods in the abstract just commented on, gives an ethical reality to them which takes them out of the morals of the ancient world and transforms them into true shapes of modern imagination. I. 592. Cf. Eschylus, 710-712. I. 619-632. The state of mankind, as Shelley saw it, described in cold, blunt, hard terms, is the climax and summary of the torture Prometheus suffers at the last moment; but his preference to feel such pain rather than be dull to it, and his continuance in faith that it shall end, combined with his lack of hatred or desire for vengeance, signalizes his perfection of soul un der experience. I. 641. Cf. Eschylus, 772. I. 660. Cf. Eschylus, 288, 289. I. 673. The torture-scene (with which, in the physical sense, the drama of Eschylus closes) being now over, the modern drama goes on to develop the regeneration of man, and first introduces this counter scene of the consolation of Prometheus by the spirits of the human mind, which inhabit thought; the voices are severally those of Revolution, Self-Sacrifice, Wisdom, and Poetry. I. 712 Between, between arch and sea. I. 772. Cf. Plato, Symposium, 195: For Homer says that the Goddess Calamity is delicate, and that her feet are tender. "Her feet are soft," he says, "for she treads not upon the ground, but makes her path upon the heads of men." (Shelley's translation.) The two spirits who sing the passage of Love followed by Ruin, present in poetical and intense imagery the one comprehensive and symbolic sorrow of the state of man: love is not denied, but its fruits are misery to mankind. The prophecy that begins and ends' in Prometheus is that he shall destroy this death that follows in Love's track, of which the Crucifixion and the Revolution have been taken as the great symbols, but similar ruin pervades all life acted on by love. I. 832. There is here the hint of philosophical idealism which makes nature's life dependent on man's consciousness; nature lives in his apprehension of and union with it. Page 178. Act II. i. Scene. The question of the time of the drama has been much commented upon, but to little effect. The scheme which regards the time as twelve hours, from midnight to high noon, is perhaps most satisfactory. The inconsistencies which conflict with such a theory are no greater than are usually to be found in Shelley's work; and it is not probable that he considered the matter carefully. Morning' at the beginning of this Act is the same as the dawn at the end of the preceding Act; and the journey of Asia and Panthea to the cave of Demogorgon is timeless; it is dawn when they arrive. The phrase, II. v. 10, The sun will rise not until noon is not to be taken literally, but only as an image of the amazement in heaven at the fall of Jupiter. Beyond that point the drama has no relation with time whatsoever. The character of Panthea is wholly developed in this Act. She has no being of her own, but is the mystical medium of communication between Prometheus and Asia; to each she is the other. In Act I. 824, she tells Prometheus that she never sleeps but when the shadow of thy spirit falls on her' [i. e., herself]. She is addressed by Asia, II. i. 31, as wearing the shadow of that soul [Prometheus] by which I live; she describes how that shadow falls upon her, and is made her being, in the dream, II. i. 71-82; and in her eyes, rather than through her words, Asia would read Prometheus' 'soul,' II. i. 110, and does behold him as if present, II. i. 119-126. On the other hand Prometheus in the dream describes her as the shadow of Asia, II. i. 71, 'Whose shadow thou art,' and Panthea asks of Asia, II. i. 113, what she can see in her eyes except thine own fairest shadow imaged there.' Panthea describes the double relation in saying, II. i. 50, that she is made the wind which fails beneath the music that I bear of thy most wordless converse,' and, II. i. 52, as dissolved into the sense with which love talks; and Asia describes Panthea's words, II. iv. 39, as echoes' of Prometheus. It has been suggested that Panthea, in these relations, is Faith in the Ideal, but it does not seem to me that there is any so precise meaning; her function is purely emotional, bringing into apparent conjunction the disunited lovers. caves The character of Demogorgon, also, is sufficiently developed in this Act for comment. The name has been traced to Lactantius, and occurs in English in Spenser, Faerie Queene, I. v. 22, IV. ii. 47, and in Milton, Paradise Lost, II. 965. Shelley clothes it with a new personality. In Act III. i. 52, he describes himself as • eternity.' His dwelling-place, before his ascent and after it, is in the Cave, which is what Shelley was accustomed to write of as the of unimagined being.' From it, II. iii. 4, the oracular vapor is hurled up' which is the nurture of enthusiastic genius, truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy, that maddening wine of life. The spirit that abides there is, in its negative phase, II. iv. 5, ungazed upon and shapeless; it can answer all questions, as in the colloquy with Asia, but a voice is wanting to express the things of eternity, II. iv. 116, the deep truth is imageless,' and II. iv. 123, of such truths each to itself must be the oracle.' The conception has points of contact with that of the soul of being in the HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY, and with numerous other apprehensions of the divine element in Shelley's poetry. It is more abstract and gray, in this shape of the genius presiding even over Jupiter's fate, than usual, because a part of the cosmic idea it embodies is transferred to Asia in this drama, as the being in whom love kindles and through whom creation becomes beautiful; Demogorgon is thus elemental in the highest degree, lying in a region back even of the great poetic conceptions of Love and Beauty, as well as of apparently Omnipotent Power, in the world of celestial time. To him, as the ultimate of being conceivable by man's imagination, the concluding chorus of the drama is fitly given. II. i. 71-87. Cf. ROSALIND AND HELEN, 10281046. II. i. 117. Cf. v. 53, note. 11. i. 140, written grief, the Ai, Ai, which the Greeks fancied they discerned in the color markings of the hyacinth. Cf. ADONAIS, xvi. 5, note. II. i. 142. It is noticeable that the first dream belongs to Prometheus, and the second appears to be that of Asia. She recollects the dream, as her own. The double character of Panthea, as the mirror of both lovers, is thus preserved. II. i. 166. The Echo songs are of course Ariel songs. II. ii. 1. The commentators who describe this chorus as the journey of love and faith through experience, in sense, emotion, will, etc. (see Miss Scudder's Prometheus Unbound, p. 151), seem to me over-subtle. The sequence from nature to emotion and impassioned thought belongs to many of Shelley's poems, and is his natural lyrical form; in each of these acts, especially I., II., and IV., it is exhibited on the grand scale, but in his minor poems it is usual. The significant part of the chorus is lines 41-63, where the stream of sound, an image so repeated as to be cardinal in the drama, is introduced, here as a symbol of the force impelling will (perhaps conceived as desire in love), controlling it. The manner of it, II. ii. 48-50, is after Plato, as in the Symposium and Phodrus; the imagery of the boat and the stream is a strange and subtle development of the voyage images in ALASTOR and THE REVOLT OF ISLAM. II. ii. 62 fatal mountain, that at which Asia and Panthea arrive in II. iii. 1. II. ii. 64. The Fauns are after the character of the Attendant Spirit in Milton's Comus. II. ii. 91 songs, ef. Virgil, Eclogues, VI. 3142. Such Virgilian echoes are found, though rarely, in Shelley. II. iii. 40. The image is one of the few sublime images in English poetry. II. iii. 54. The first and third stanzas describe the Cave of Demogorgon as the place of increate eternity or absolute being; it is set forth necessarily by negatives, except in the attributes of universality and unity in II. iii. 80. II. iii. 94 meekness, i. e., the meekness of Prometheus in his mood toward Jupiter, as shown in Act I., and in his whole moral character as developed at the end of that Act. It is because of this change in Prometheus, as noted above, that now the Eternal, the Immortal' (Demogorgon) must unloose through life's portal that Snake-like Doom' (the Spirit of the Hour of Jupiter's overthrow), 'by that alone,' i. e., the inherent moral power of Prometheus' spiritual state. It should be recalled that Prometheus is mankind, to get the full force of the lesson enunciated. II. iv. 12. Rossetti and Swinburne conjecture that a line is missing. The former corrects when into at; but this only avoids the difficulty. The sense is plain, and the text must be accepted as corrupt. II. iv. 48. Cf. Eschylus, 232, 233. II. iv. 49 et seq. The speech is based on Eschylus, 205–262, 444-514, but is highly developed, possibly with some obligation to Lucretius, Bk. v. II. iv. 83. Cf. I. 451, note. II. v. 20. The story of the birth of Venus. The irradiation of Asia, as the spirit of love filling the world with created beauty (into which complex conception enter so many mythological and metaphysical strands from Lu cretius, Plato, and antique legend) is the highest point reached by Shelley in rendering the character dramatically, as the lyrics immediately following are the highest point reached in its lyrical expression. The lines II. iv. 40-47 are the antithesis of I. 619-632. They are the abstract statement of love, as the former of hatred. The lyrics following are a highly imaginative statement of love and parallel with I. 764-780. II. v. 48. The lyric is an invocation of Asia as the light of life, shadow of beauty unbeheld' (III. iii. 6) the spirit presiding in creation, the divine vivida vis, the invisible power making for beauty, through love, in the world of sensible experience. In the first two stanzas, Shelley presents the supernal brightness as half revealed in the breath and smile of life, but insupportable, and again as burning through the beauty of nature, which is an atmosphere about it; but in the third and fourth stanzas he returns to its invisibility, as a thing heard like music, as the source of all beauty of shape and all joy of soul, but insupportable in these modes of knowledge and experience as in its half-visible forms. II. v. 53. Forman aptly quotes Shelley to Peacock, April 6, 1819: The only inferior part [in the Roman beauties] are the eyes, which, though good and gentle, want the mazy depth of color behind color with which the intellectual women of England and Germany entangle the heart in soul-inspiring labyrinths.' Cf. i. 117; THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, XII. v. 2. II. v. 72. The following lyric takes up the image of the boat and the stream from II. ii. 4163 (cf. note), and elaborates it, the boat being the soul of Asia, driven on the song of the Singer; the Singer and Asia are thus united spiritually in the song and guided musically on the mystic voyage backward through the forms of human life to the soul's preëxistent eternity (reversing Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality). Cf. To CONSTANTIA, SINGING, and TO ONE SINGING, p. 488. Page 189. Act III. i. 40. Cf. Lucan, Pharsalia, ix. 723. III. i. 69. Jupiter acknowledges the real supremacy of the moral nature. III. i. 72. Cf. THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, I. vi. et seq. III. ii. The scene is idyllic, not only by virtue of the calm classical figures of Apollo and Oceanus, but as containing the first of the millennial descriptions which now recur to the end of the drama. III. ii. 46. Cf. THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, II. xxix, 1. III. iii. 10 Cave, the first of the caves which Shelley delighted to depict as refuges from the world. It is to be taken as an Italian element in his verse. III. iii. 15. The stalactite formations met with in ALASTOR. III. iii. 25 mutability, a constant and characteristic word and thought of Shelley. III, iii, 49-60. This æsthetic theory is purely Platonic. Cf. Plato, especially Symposium and Phædrus. Cf. ODE TO LIBERTY, xvii. 9. III. iii 70 shell. Salt quotes from Hogg: 'Sir Guyon de Shelley, one of the most famous of the Paladins, carried about with him three conches. When he made the third conch, the golden one, vocal, the law of God was immediately exalted, and the law of the devil annulled and abrogated wherever the potent sound reached. Was Shelley thinking of this golden conch when he described, in his great poem, that mystic shell from which is sounded the trumpet-blast of universal freedom?' III. iii. 91-93. The sympathy of Shelley with life in its humblest forms was almost Buddhistic in solicitude. Cf. below, III. iv. 36, or THE SENSITIVE PLANT, II. 41. III. iii. 111. Cf. I. 150. III. iii. 113. Cf. SONNET, 'Lift not the painted veil.' III. iii. 124. The cavern where Prometheus was born, seemingly the same as in III. iii. 10, more developed in the description. III. iii. 171. This line, in connection with 108-110, intimates a greater faith in immortality than any previous passage of Shelley, but "it is a shadowy intimation. Cf. IV. 536. The dead, throughout the drama, are described in the pagan spirit, and the lot of man, not exempt even in this millennium from chance and death and mutability,' is opposed to the lot of the immortals as at a pagan distance below themthe fate that Lucretius described. III. iv. The Spirit of the Earth now takes the place of the Earth in the drama. The form it wears is a characteristic Shelleyan conception, belonging to his most unshared originality in creation. Cf. PRINCE ATHANASE, II. 106, note. III. iv. 54 sound, the shell. III. iv. 76, 77. The ease with which all things put their evil nature off,' and the little change the action involved, are both characteristic of Shelley's ethical scheme. Evil was conceived as something that could be laid aside, like a garment, by the will of man. Cf. III. iv. 199, note. III. iv. 104, 105. Through the power of love. III. iv. 128 change. Cf. III. iv. 104, 105. III. iv. 172. Rossetti conjectures a comma after conquerors and a period after round. The text of Shelley seems plain without the change. The emblems of Power and Faith stand in the new world unregarded and mouldering memorials of a dead past, just as the Egyptian monuments imaged to a later time than their own a vanished monarchy and religion; the fact that these monuments survived the new race and last into our still later time is an unnecessary and subordinate incident inserted because it appealed to Shelley's imagination. Cf. Swinburne, Notes on the Text of Shelley. III. iv. 193, 197. The ideal here described is anarchistic, but it is also the ultimate of the ideas of freedom, fraternity, and equality, and of the supremacy of that inward moral order which would dispense with those functions of government in which Shelley believed wrong necessarily resides. III. iv. 199. The supremacy of the 'will' of man, though less dwelt on in this drama, is conceived in the same way as in THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, VIII. xvi., the ODE TO LIBERTY, V. 10, SONNET, POLITICAL GREATNESS, 11. It is fundamental in Shelley's beliefs. Page 197. Act IV. This act was, as the Head-note states, an afterthought. It is to be observed that Prometheus, after his release, ceases to be of importance, owing to the fact that his symbolic character as mankind is dropped, and liberated and regenerated society is directly described in the millennial passages. In this Act he does not appear at all, though the true significance of deed closes drama. Similarly, Asia disappears. Panthea and Ione are the spectators and act as the chorus, in the Greek sense, to the other participants. The part of the chorus has from the beginning of the drama threatened to overwhelm the part of the actors; here it does so to such an extent that the Act presents the anomaly (in form) of lyrical passages as the main interest, with the chorus, properly speaking, in blank verse. The Act has three movements: the pean of the Hours, the antiphony of the Earth and the Moon, the Invocation of the Universe by Demogorgon. IV. 34 One, Prometheus. IV. 65-67. These three lines might be taken severally as a summary of the theme of Acts I., II., and III. IV. 82. A singularly felicitous expression to describe the double aspect of language as sound and color. IV. 186. The harmony of the sphere. IV. 203. The image of the stream of sound is here again introduced. Cf. II. v. 72, note. IV. 210. The image is of the new moon with the old moon in her arms.' Cf. THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE, 79-85. IV. 213 regard, appear. IV. 217. The sunset image accounts for the phrase ebbing' in 208. Cf. REVOLT OF ISLAM, I. vi. 8, note. IV. 238 sphere, the earth. IV. 247. The intention seems to be to suggest the incessant operation of manifold natural forces and processes in the sphere, each in its own realm. IV. 265. This is the same spirit as in III. iii. 148. IV. 272. The reference is to Harmodius and Aristogeiton. |