Reprinted from Works. London: John Murray, 1832.
PROMETHEUS
by: George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788-1824)
1. ITAN! to whose immortal eyes
2. The sufferings of mortality,
3. Seen in their sad reality,
4. Were not as things that gods despise;
5. What was thy pity's recompense?
6. A silent suffering, and intense;
7. The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
8. All that the proud can feel of pain,
9. The agony they do not show,
10. The suffocating sense of woe,
11. Which speaks but in its loneliness,
12. And then is jealous lest the sky
13. Should have a listener, nor will sigh
14. Until its voice is echoless.
15. Titan! to thee the strife was given
16. Between the suffering and the will,
17. Which torture where they cannot kill;
18. And the inexorable Heaven,
19. And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
20. The ruling principle of Hate,
21. Which for its pleasure doth create
22. The things it may annihilate,
23. Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
24. The wretched gift Eternity
25. Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.
26. All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
27. Was but the menace which flung back
28. On him the torments of thy rack;
29. The fate thou didst so well foresee,
30. But would not to appease him tell;
31. And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
32. And in his Soul a vain repentance,
33. And evil dread so ill dissembled,
34. That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
35. Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
36. To render with thy precepts less
37. The sum of human wretchedness,
38. And strengthen Man with his own mind;
39. But baffled as thou wert from high,
40. Still in thy patient energy,
41. In the endurance, and repulse
42. Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
43. Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
44. A mighty lesson we inherit:
45. Thou art a symbol and a sign
46. To Mortals of their fate and force;
47. Like thee, Man is in part divine,
48. A troubled stream from a pure source;
49. And Man in portions can foresee
50. His own funereal destiny;
51. His wretchedness, and his resistance,
52. And his sad unallied existence:
53. To which his Spirit may oppose
54. Itself--and equal to all woes,
55. And a firm will, and a deep sense,
56. Which even in torture can descry
57. Its own concenter'd recompense,
58. Triumphant where it dares defy,
59. And making Death a Victory.
This poem deals with Prometheus myth, in it we find the description of all the sufferings Prometheus bore, due to his daring to steal the fire to give it to the mortals, and therefore he became the protector of the human kind.
In the first and second stanzas there is the description of the punishments Zeus imposed to him. On the other hand, the third stanza is focused on the idealization of Prometheus as the liberator of the mortals and how his deeds made Man more divine and wise.
Byron uses the second person as if talking to Prometheus directly, in a vocative way, for instance, in line 5 and 16 thy and thee the archaic form of your and you, it reflects the proximity of the God to Man. The author also calls him Titan in lines 1 and 15 trying to attract his attention.
Although the poem has a clear addressee, we can infer that it is autobiographical, this Titan embodies the personality of Lord Byron, this is the description of how the author sees himself. In a way he is a kind of immortal God, through literature every single author becomes eternal, their work will remain there reminding us their existence. On the other hand his narcissism and his alienation made him a kind of inaccessible person, and this contributed to this image of divine and superior being. Prometheus becomes a kind of Jesus Christ adapted to his atheist ideas, this god sacrifices his existence for the common people, in some sense the author tries to help the readers to have a “worthy life” but we can see the negative attitude of Byron towards the human being.
Mythological references are widely used in romantic poetry, it shows how the authors adapted their reality to ancient myths, they tried to escape using the imagination, evoking mysterious and exotic places, in this poem we are taken to Greece, where all the titans dwell.
Prometheus is a Byronic hero, he acts in a self destructing manner, showing his distaste for social rules and institutions, he has no respect for Zeus although he is superior in rank and through this rebellion stealing the fire he becomes an outcast. He does not mind the repercussion of his acts he had his own ideas and reacted against the imposed rules.
METRIC ANALYSIS
This poem is divided in three stanzas, the first one has 14 verses, the second 20 and the third 25. The rhyme is ABBACCDDEEFGGF HIIHJJJJKLMNOONMPPQQ RSSRTUVWVWXYXYUUZZAABCBCD. It combines feminine and masculine rhymes, and the endings are always in half rhyme, except lines 50 and 59 that are blank verses.
RETHORICAL ANALYSIS
In the first stanza in line 1 we find the first reference to a myth calling Titan to Prometheus, this would be a metonimy as the author refers to him by his race, this trope appears in the same line in “immortal eyes”, Byron wants to make us understand that Prometheus is an immortal god not only his eyes, but the whole of him.
In line 5 there is an erotema as Byron asks a question that will not be answered and also an archaism “thy”. In line 6 we find an anastrophe, as the usual order would be “a silent and intense suffering”. In line 7 there are three symbols of death which remind us how Prometheus was punished, in the next line there is a personification “proud” is an adjective used to include all those people who are proud, it becomes a noun. In line 7 we find an anastrophe because the usual order would be “they do not show the agony” but in this case the author wants “the agony” to be emphasized. In line 11 to 14 there are other personifications, the initial “which speaks” may possibly refer to “the suffocating sense of woe”, but speak is an action that only a person can realize, and in the following lines it is suggested that the sky could have a listener and that he would sigh.
The second stanza begins following the same pattern as the first, so we can consider it an anaphora, there is also an archaism in the use of “thee”. In the next lines there is personification “inexorable Heaven”, “deaf tyranny of Fate”, both of them are written with initial capital letters revealing their condition of personal nouns. In line 23 we find an archaism “thee”. In lines 24-25 there is an anastrophe when it is said “The wretched gift of eternity was "thine”, the words “thine”, “thou”, and “hast” are also archaisms of the current forms “yours”, “you” and “has”. In line 26 there is a denominatio as Byron uses “Thunderer” to make reference to Zeus and an archaism “thee”. In line 29 there is an anaphora. In verse 31 there is an archaism “thy” and the author emphasizes to “Silence”, “Sentence” and “Soul” the former in the next line. We could consider there is an anaphora at the beginning of lines 31, 32 and 33.
We find more archaisms in lines 35, 36, 39, 40, 42,45 and 47.
In line 38 there is a metonimy because “Man” refers to the human kind, that is the reason why the author writes it with initial capital letter. In line 39 there is a symbol of heaven, when the author uses “high” he refers to the place were Greek gods dwell. In line 48 there is a metaphor, Prometheus would be the “pure source” as he sacrificed himself for the mortals and the “troubled stream” would be men.
In line 59 we find an antithesis “Death a Victory” as we relate death with defeat, but the author feels repulsion for life and it is his way of express it.
LORD BYRON’S PRODUCTION
These are Lord Byron major works:
Hours of Idleness (1806)
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812 – 1818)
The Giaour (1813)
The Bride of Abydos (1813)
The Corsair (1814)
Lara (1814)
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
The Siege of Corinth (1816)
Parisina (1816)
The Prisoner Of Chillon (1816)
The Dream (1816)
Prometheus (1816)
Darkness (1816)
Manfred (1817)
The Lament of Tasso (1817)
Beppo (1818)
Mazeppa (1819)
The Prophecy of Dante (1819)
Marino Faliero (1820)
Sardanapalus (1821)
The Two Foscari (1821)
Cain (1821)
The Vision of Judgement (1821)
Heaven and Earth (1821)
Werner (1822)
The Deformed Transformed (1822)
The Age of Bronze (1823)
The Island (1823)
Don Juan (1819 – 1824)
“Prometheus” was written after Byron’s trip around Europe, during this journey he gathered lots of information for his poetry and developed the characteristics of the “sensitive and high-minded wanderer, exiled from a society which he despised” as David Daches wrote in A Critical History of English Literature (4: 923). Therefore, after 1811 we will find the figure of the Byronic Hero, which in fact is an anti-hero, in Byron’s works. This is a complex character with a conflictive mind, self- critical, alienated from society, rebelling against the rules… We can find more examples of this character in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, “The Giaour”, “The Corsair”… It became nearly a literary fashion. In “Prometheus” we can even interpret this character as the representation of Napoleon leading the spirit of revolution.
Other of the highligthed traits is the use of mythology. Romantic poets exploited this theme as they were attracted to the irrational, mystical and supernatural world. They used it to criticise their society, to wake up the individual consciousness, and in this case Byron chose Prometheus myth as the one who gave awareness to Man, but the pessimistic personality of the writer prevails.
This poem is important because it relates the chaotic moment he is suffering when he wrote it. In 1812 he was involved in an scandal with Lady Caroline Lamb, who got obsessed with him. He was also related to his cousin Augusta, who gave birth a daughter supposedly from their incestuous relation and in 1815 he got married to Anne Isabella Milbanke, he treated her bad and their marriage lasted only a year. There were rumours of marital violence, adultery, homosexuality…In 1816 he left England and went to Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, there he met Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Godwin.
In Prometheus is the protagonist in an indirect way, he is like a god who has committed a crime and is punished for it, he becomes an exilee, for behaving in the way he felt was right, he is misunderstood by society and that could not be accepted. He despised English society for being hypocritical and he was under a lot of pressure, that he decided to exile himself voluntarily. He became a Prometheus by his own decission.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. The Routledge History of Literature in English. Oxfordshire: Routledge 2001
David Daches. A Critical History of English Literature. Vol. 4. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1969
ELECTRONIC SOURCES
“Romanticism.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 23 November 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
“Romanticism.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 23 November 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gordon_Byron%2C_6th_Baron_Byron
"The Byronic Hero." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 23 November 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero
"The Byronic Hero."
http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/english/allen/byron2.htm