PROMETHEUS (1816)
TITAN! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.
Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself--and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.
George Gordon Lord
Byron (1788-1824)
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/lbyron/bl-lbyron-prometheus.htm
SUMMARY OF
THE POEM
According
to the title of the poem, we notice that it is about Prometheus, a mythological
hero. The mythology says that Prometheus stole the fire from the Divinities and
gave it to the people. Zeus punished him for this, he chained Prometheus to a
rock where an eagle pecks his liver during the day and his liver grows every
night. Hercules killed the eagle and freed Prometheus from his punishment.
Lord Byron
is a romantic poet. We can see in his poems the reflection of his life, because
he puts a lot of passion and energy in them. In this work, Byron reflects the
agony of Prometheus for the punishment that Zeus imposed on him. Byron is a
heroic poet, and he has some relation with the Greek people, and with
In my opinion,
Byron tries to show the reader (always form his point of view) how the
punishment of this hero was by telling how much Prometheus suffered and in what
way he was liberated by a strong man (Hercules)
The theme
of the poem is very clear, the punishment of Prometheus for stealing the
Divinities’ fire and giving it to the humans. To explain this, Byron has
written the poem in three stanzas.
The first
stanza is about the suffering of the hero viewed form Prometheus’ point of view
(verses 2 & 3) and Zeus’ punishment for Prometheus’ evil action (verses 5
& 6)
In the
second stanza, longer than the first, Byron wants to show the reader that Zeus’
punishment was very cruel and so strong (verses 15 & 16). Prometheus has
the opportunity to surrender to his punishment, but refuses this opportunity an
prefers to suffer (verse 33)
In the
third stanza, the poet wants to show that Prometheus’ action was in favour of
the humans. This stanza also shows how Prometheus was liberated by Hercules
(verse 38). In addition, this stanza tells the reader how Prometheus’ life was
after his liberation and how much he suffered.
The tone of
this poem is clearly mythological, because Byron was inspired by the myth of
Prometheus and the divine fire to write this poem. The author wants to
emphasize the sentiments of Prometheus himself by using him as the principal
object of this poem.
In this
poem we can imagine some images, which have relation with the theme of the
poem. First, we imagine Prometheus in
In my
opinion, Lord Byron was fascinated with this myth. The meaning of this myth
could be the fire discovered by humans, as all know; the fire was discovered by
years of evolution of the humans, and not by taking it from the Divinities, the
myth was used to explain this process and give fire a mythical significance