280And thus devote to sleepless agony
This undeclining head while thou must reign on high.
But thou who art the God and Lord—O thou
Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe,
To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow
285 In fear and worship—all-prevailing foe!
I curse thee! let a sufferer’s curse
Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse
Till thine Infinity shall be
A robe of envenomed agony;
290And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain,
To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain.
Heap on thy soul, by virtue of this curse,
Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good;
Both infinite as is the Universe,
295 And thou, and thy self-torturing solitude.
An awful image of calm power
Though now thou sittest, let the hour
Come, when thou must appear to be
That which thou art internally,
300And after many a false and fruitless crime
Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and time.
Prometheus
Were these my words, O Parent?
The Earth
They were thine.
Prometheus
It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;
Grief for a while is blind, and so was mine.
305 I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
The Earth
Misery, Oh misery to me
That Jove at length should vanquish thee.
Wail, howl aloud, Land and Sea,
The Earth’s rent heart shall answer ye.
310Howl, Spirits of the living and the dead,
Your refuge, your defence lies fallen and vanquished.
First Echo
Lies fallen and vanquished?
Second Echo
Fallen and vanquished?
Ione
Fear not: ’tis but some passing spasm,
315 The Titan is unvanquished still.
But see, where through the azure chasm
Of yon forked and snowy hill
Trampling the slant winds on high
With golden-sandalled feet, that glow
320Under plumes of purple dye,
Like rose-ensanguined ivory,
A Shape comes now,
Stretching on high from his right hand
A serpent-cinctured wand.
Panthea
325’Tis Jove’s world-wandering herald, Mercury.
Ione
And who are those with hydra tresses
And iron wings that climb the wind,
Whom the frowning God represses
Like vapours steaming up behind,
330Clanging loud, an endless crowd—
Panthea
These are Jove’s tempest-walking hounds,
Whom he gluts with groans and blood,
When charioted on sulphurous cloud
He bursts Heaven’s bounds.
Ione
335Are they now led, from the thin dead
On new pangs to be fed?
Panthea
The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud.
First Fury
Ha! I scent life!
Second Fury
Let me but look into his eyes!
Third Fury
The hope of torturing him smells like a heap
340Of corpses, to a death-bird after battle.
First Fury
Darest thou delay, O Herald! take cheer, Hounds
Of Hell: what if the Son of Maia soon
Should make us food and sport? Who can please long
The Omnipotent?
Mercury
Back to your towers of iron,
345And gnash, beside the streams of fire and wail,
Your foodless teeth … Geryon, arise! and Gorgon,
Chimaera, and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends,
Who ministered to Thebes Heaven’s poisoned wine,
Unnatural love, and more unnatural hate:
350These shall perform your task.
First Fury
Oh, mercy! mercy!
We die with our desire—drive us not back!
Crouch then in silence.—
Awful Sufferer!
To thee unwilling, most unwillingly
I come, by the great Father’s will driven down
355To execute a doom of new revenge.
Alas! I pity thee, and hate myself
That I can do no more: aye from thy sight
Returning, for a season, Heaven seems Hell,
So thy worn form pursues me night and day,
360Smiling reproach. Wise art thou, firm and good,
But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife
Against the Omnipotent; as yon clear lamps
That measure and divide the weary years
From which there is no refuge, long have taught
365And long must teach. Even now thy Torturer arms
With the strange might of unimagined pains
The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell,
And my commission is to lead them here,
Or what more subtle, foul, or savage fiends
370People the abyss, and leave them to their task.
Be it not so! There is a secret known
To thee, and to none else of living things,
Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven,
The fear of which perplexes the Supreme:
375Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne
In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer,
And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane,
Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart:
For benefits and meek submission tame
380The fiercest and the mightiest.
Prometheus
Evil minds
Change good to their own nature. I gave all
He has; and in return he chains me here
Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun
Split my parched skin, or in the moony night
385The crystal-winged snow cling round my hair—
Whilst my beloved race is trampled down
By his thought-executing ministers.
Such is the tyrant’s recompense—’tis just:
He who is evil can receive no good;
390And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost,
He can feel hate, fear, shame—not gratitude:
He but requites me for his own misdeed.
Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks
With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge.
395Submission, thou dost know I cannot try:
For what submission but that fatal word,
The death-seal of mankind’s captivity,
Like the Sicilian’s hair-suspended sword
Which trembles o’er his crown, would he accept,
400Or could I yield? Which yet I will not yield.
Let others flatter Crime, where it sits throned
In brief Omnipotence; secure are they:
For Justice, when triumphant, will weep down
Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs,
405Too much avenged by those who err. I wait,
Enduring thus, the retributive hour
Which since we spake is even nearer now.
But hark, the hell-hounds clamour: fear delay!
Behold! Heaven lowers under thy Father’s frown.
Mercury
410Oh, that we might be spared: I to inflict,
And thou to suffer! Once more answer me:
Thou knowest not the period of Jove’s power?
Prometheus
I know but this, that it must come.
Mercury
Alas!
Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain?
Prometheus
415They last while Jove must reign; nor more, nor less
Do I desire or fear.
Mercury
Yet pause, and plunge
Into Eternity, where recorded time,
Even all that we imagine, age on age,
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
420Flags wearily in its unending flight
Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;
Perchance it has not numbered the slow years
Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved?
Prometheus
Perchance no thought can count them—yet they pass.
Mercury
425If thou might’st dwell among the Gods the while,
Lapped in voluptuous joy?
Prometheus
I would not quit
This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains.
Mercury
Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee.
Prometheus
Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven,
430Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene
As light in the sun, throned … How vain is talk!
Call up the fiends.
Ione
O, sister, look! White fire
Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;
How fearfully God’s thunder howls behind!
Mercury
435I must obey his words and thine—alas!
Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart!
Panthea
See where the child of Heaven, with winged feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
Ione
Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes
440Lest thou behold and die—they come, they come
Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
And hollow underneath, like death.
First Fury
Prometheus!
Second Fury
Immortal Titan!
Third Fury
Champion of Heaven’s slaves!
Prometheus
He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here,
445Prometheus, the chained Titan. Horrible forms,
What and who are ye? Never yet there came
Phantasms so foul through monster-teeming Hell
From the all-miscreative brain of Jove;
Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
450Methinks I grow like what I contemplate,
And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy.
First Fury
We are the ministers of pain and fear,
And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
455Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn,
We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
When the great King betrays them to our will.
Prometheus
O many fearful natures in one name,
I know ye, and these lakes and echoes know
460The darkness and the clangour of your wings.
But why more hideous than your loathed selves
Gather ye up in legions from the deep?
Second Fury
We knew not that: Sisters, rejoice, rejoice!
Prometheus
Can aught exult in its deformity?
Second Fury
465The beauty of delight makes lovers glad,
Gazing on one another: so are we.
As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers
The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
470So from our victim’s destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round,
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.
Prometheus
I laugh your power, and his who sent you here,
To lowest scorn.—Pour forth the cup of pain.
First Fury
475Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone,
And nerve from nerve, working like fire within?
Prometheus
Pain is my element, as hate is thine;
Ye rend me now: I care not.
Second Fury
Dost imagine
We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes?
Prometheus
480I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer,
Being evil. Cruel was the Power which called
You, or aught else so wretched, into light.
Third Fury
Thou think’st we will live through thee, one by one,
Like animal life, and though we can obscure not
485The soul which burns within, that we will dwell
Beside it, like a vain loud multitude
Vexing the self-content of wisest men:
That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain,
And foul desire round thine astonished heart,
490And blood within thy labyrinthine veins
Crawling like agony.
Prometheus
Why, ye are thus now;
Yet am I king over myself, and rule
The torturing and conflicting throngs within,
As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous.
Chorus of Furies
495From the ends of the Earth, from the ends of the Earth,
Where the night has its grave and the morning its birth,
Come, come, come!
O ye who shake hills with the scream of your mirth
When cities sink howling in ruin; and ye
500Who with wingless footsteps trample the sea,
And close upon Shipwreck and Famine’s track,
Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wreck;
Come, come, come!
Leave the bed, low, cold, and red,
505 Strewed beneath a nation dead;
Leave the hatred, as in ashes
Fire is left for future burning:
It will burst in bloodier flashes
When ye stir it, soon returning:
510 Leave the self-contempt implanted
In young spirits, sense-enchanted,
Misery’s yet unkindled fuel:
Leave Hell’s secrets half unchanted
To the maniac dreamer: cruel
515 More than ye can be with hate
Is he with fear.
Come, come, come!
We are steaming up from Hell’s wide gate
And we burthen the blasts of the atmosphere,
520But vainly we toil till ye come here.
Ione
Sister, I hear the thunder of new wings.
Panthea
These solid mountains quiver with the sound
Even as the tremulous air: their shadows make
The space within my plumes more black than night.
First Fury
525Your call was as a winged car
Driven on whirlwinds fast and far;
It rapt us from red gulfs of war.
Second Fury
From wide cities, famine-wasted—
Third Fury
Groans half heard, and blood untasted—
Fourth Fury
530Kingly conclaves stern and cold,
Where blood with gold is bought and sold—
Fifth Fury
From the furnace white and hot
In which—
A Fury
Speak not—whisper not;
I know all that ye would tell,
535But to speak might break the spell
Which must bend the Invincible,
The stern of thought;
He yet defies the deepest power of Hell.
A Fury
Tear the veil!
Another Fury
It is torn.
Chorus
The pale stars of the morn
540Shine on a misery dire
to be borne.
Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn.
Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken’dst for man?
Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran
Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever,
545Hope, love, doubt, desire—which consume him for ever.
One came forth of gentle worth
Smiling on the sanguine earth;
His words outlived him, like swift poison
Withering up truth, peace, and pity.
550Look! where round the wide horizon
Many a million-peopled city
Vomits smoke in the bright air—
Hark that outcry of despair!
’Tis his mild and gentle ghost
555 Wailing for the faith he kindled:
Look again, the flames almost
To a glow-worm’s lamp have dwindled:
The survivors round the embers
Gather in dread.
560 Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.
Semichorus I
Drops of bloody agony flow
565From his white and quivering brow.
Grant a little respite now—
See! a disenchanted nation
Springs like day from desolation;
To Truth its state is dedicate,
570 And Freedom leads it forth, her mate;
A legioned band of linked brothers
Whom Love calls children—
Semichorus II