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Percy Shelley: Poems

Prometheus Unbound: Note


On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return.

His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by

a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to

his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December,

1817, he had written from Marlow to a friend, saying:


'My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of

a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and

keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the

very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present

themselves to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink

into a state of lethargy and inanimation, and often remain for hours

on the sofa between sleep and waking, a prey to the most painful

irritability of thought. Such, with little intermission, is my

condition. The hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant

caution from among these periods of endurance. It is not for this that

I think of travelling to Italy, even if I knew that Italy would

relieve me. But I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and

although at present it has passed away without any considerable

vestige of its existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows the true

nature of my disease to be consumptive. It is to my advantage that

this malady is in its nature slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive

to its advances, is susceptible of cure from a warm climate. In the

event of its assuming any decided shape, IT WOULD BE MY DUTY to go to

Italy without delay. It is not mere health, but life, that I should

seek, and that not for my own sake--I feel I am capable of trampling

on all such weakness; but for the sake of those to whom my life may be

a source of happiness, utility, security, and honour, and to some of

whom my death might be all that is the reverse.'


In almost every respect his journey to Italy was advantageous. He left

behind friends to whom he was attached; but cares of a thousand kinds,

many springing from his lavish generosity, crowded round him in his

native country, and, except the society of one or two friends, he had

no compensation. The climate caused him to consume half his existence

in helpless suffering. His dearest pleasure, the free enjoyment of the

scenes of Nature, was marred by the same circumstance.


He went direct to Italy, avoiding even Paris, and did not make any

pause till he arrived at Milan. The first aspect of Italy enchanted

Shelley; it seemed a garden of delight placed beneath a clearer and

brighter heaven than any he had lived under before. He wrote long

descriptive letters during the first year of his residence in Italy,

which, as compositions, are the most beautiful in the world, and show

how truly he appreciated and studied the wonders of Nature and Art in

that divine land.


The poetical spirit within him speedily revived with all the power and

with more than all the beauty of his first attempts. He meditated

three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas. One was the story

of Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song of Tasso remains. The

other was one founded on the Book of Job, which he never abandoned in

idea, but of which no trace remains among his papers. The third was

the "Prometheus Unbound". The Greek tragedians were now his most

familiar companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of

Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight. The father of Greek

tragedy does not possess the pathos of Sophocles, nor the variety and

tenderness of Euripides; the interest on which he founds his dramas is

often elevated above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and

throes of gods and demi-gods: such fascinated the abstract imagination

of Shelley.


We spent a month at Milan, visiting the Lake of Como during that

interval. Thence we passed in succession to Pisa, Leghorn, the Baths

of Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome, Naples, and back again to Rome, whither

we returned early in March, 1819. During all this time Shelley

meditated the subject of his drama, and wrote portions of it. Other

poems were composed during this interval, and while at the Bagni di

Lucca he translated Plato's "Symposium". But, though he diversified

his studies, his thoughts centred in the Prometheus. At last, when at

Rome, during a bright and beautiful Spring, he gave up his whole time

to the composition. The spot selected for his study was, as he

mentions in his preface, the mountainous ruins of the Baths of

Caracalla. These are little known to the ordinary visitor at Rome. He

describes them in a letter, with that poetry and delicacy and truth of

description which render his narrated impressions of scenery of

unequalled beauty and interest.


At first he completed the drama in three acts. It was not till several

months after, when at Florence, that he conceived that a fourth act, a

sort of hymn of rejoicing in the fulfilment of the prophecies with

regard to Prometheus, ought to be added to complete the composition.


The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human

species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation,

but an accident that might be expelled. This also forms a portion of

Christianity: God made earth and man perfect, till he, by his fall,


'Brought death into the world and all our woe.'


Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no

evil, and there would be none. It is not my part in these Notes to

notice the arguments that have been urged against this opinion, but to

mention the fact that he entertained it, and was indeed attached to it

with fervent enthusiasm. That man could be so perfectionized as to be

able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of

the creation, was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he

loved best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil

Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who

were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a

victim full of fortitude and hope and the spirit of triumph emanating

from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. Such he had

depicted in his last poem, when he made Laon the enemy and the victim

of tyrants. He now took a more idealized image of the same subject. He

followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good

principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the

regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence,

used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond

the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which

they are virtuous through wisdom. Jupiter punished the temerity of the

Titan by chaining him to a rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to

devour his still-renewed heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven

portending the fall of Jove, the secret of averting which was known

only to Prometheus; and the god offered freedom from torture on

condition of its being communicated to him. According to the

mythological story, this referred to the offspring of Thetis, who was

destined to be greater than his father. Prometheus at last bought

pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with his gifts, by revealing

the prophecy. Hercules killed the vulture, and set him free; and

Thetis was married to Peleus, the father of Achilles.


Shelley adapted the catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views.

The son greater than his father, born of the nuptials of Jupiter and

Thetis, was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that

of Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures

centuries of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the

real event, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will

flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world

drives him from his usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of

Hercules, liberates Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the

tortures generated by evil done or suffered. Asia, one of the

Oceanides, is the wife of Prometheus--she was, according to other

mythological interpretations, the same as Venus and Nature. When the

benefactor of mankind is liberated, Nature resumes the beauty of her

prime, and is united to her husband, the emblem of the human race, in

perfect and happy union. In the Fourth Act, the Poet gives further

scope to his imagination, and idealizes the forms of creation--such as

we know them, instead of such as they appeared to the Greeks. Maternal

Earth, the mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth,

the guide of our planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and

weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss

from the annihilation of Evil in the superior sphere.


Shelley develops, more particularly in the lyrics of this drama, his

abstruse and imaginative theories with regard to the Creation. It

requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the

mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary

reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are

far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays

on the nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what

is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observations

and remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of

Mind and Nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.


More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible

imagery. Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of

the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also

on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.

Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.


I find in one of his manuscript books some remarks on a line in the

"Oedipus Tyrannus", which show at once the critical subtlety of

Shelley's mind, and explain his apprehension of those 'minute and

remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or

the living beings which surround us,' which he pronounces, in the

letter quoted in the note to the "Revolt of Islam", to comprehend all

that is sublime in man.


'In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image,


Pollas d' odous elthonta phrontidos planois:


a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry; yet how simple are the

images in which it is arrayed!


"Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought."


If the words odous and planois had not been used, the line might have

been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we

say "WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But

they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet;

and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert,

or roams from city to city--as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was

destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this

line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as

the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world

which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do

searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some

valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface.'


In reading Shelley's poetry, we often find similar verses, resembling,

but not imitating the Greek in this species of imagery; for, though he

adopted the style, he gifted it with that originality of form and

colouring which sprung from his own genius.


In the "Prometheus Unbound", Shelley fulfils the promise quoted from a

letter in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the

proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in

an exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however

injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph

of anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last

century. But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated

by Lieutenant Crawford from the German of Dr. Huber, of Rostock, fell

into my hands. The account of the triumph of the priests and the

serviles, after the French invasion of Spain in 1823, bears a strong

and frightful resemblance to some of the descriptions of the massacre

of the patriots in the "Revolt of Islam".) The tone of the composition

is calmer and more majestic, the poetry more perfect as a whole, and

the imagination displayed at once more pleasingly beautiful and more

varied and daring. The description of the Hours, as they are seen in

the cave of Demogorgon, is an instance of this--it fills the mind as

the most charming picture--we long to see an artist at work to bring

to our view the


'cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds

Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands

A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.

Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,

And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:

Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink

With eager lips the wind of their own speed,

As if the thing they loved fled on before,

And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks

Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all

Sweep onward.'


Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of

love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the

prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the

law of the world.


England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by

the sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal

opinions were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in

the Court of Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him

regard a visit to Italy as necessary to prolong his life. An exile,

and strongly impressed with the feeling that the majority of his

countrymen regarded him with sentiments of aversion such as his own

heart could experience towards none, he sheltered himself from such

disgusting and painful thoughts in the calm retreats of poetry, and

built up a world of his own--with the more pleasure, since he hoped to

induce some one or two to believe that the earth might become such,

did mankind themselves consent. The charm of the Roman climate helped

to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn

before. And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in

their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the

Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms

of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many

passages in the "Prometheus" which show the intense delight he

received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty

of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet

must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and

he wrote from Rome, 'My "Prometheus Unbound" is just finished, and in

a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and

mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is

better than any of my former attempts.'


I may mention, for the information of the more critical reader, that

the verbal alterations in this edition of "Prometheus" are made from a

list of errata written by Shelley himself.