 | Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece, with Other Poems |  |
PROMETHEUS.
No character of primeval Greek tradition has been a greater favourite with modern poets than the hero of the well known play of Æschylus. The common conception of him, however, made fashionable by Shelley and Byron, as the representative of freedom in contest with despotism, is quite modern; and Gœthe is nearer the depth of the old myth, when, in his beautiful lyric, he represents the Titan as the impersonation of that indefatigable endurance in man, which conquers the earth by skilful labour, in opposition to and in despite of those terrible influences of the wild elemental powers of Nature, which, to the Greek imagination, were concentrated in the person of Jove. On the apparent impiety of the position of Prometheus, as against the Olympian, see my Essay in Classical Museum, Vol. v., p. l. 1848.
—Æschylus.
I
Blow blustering winds; loud thunders roll!Swift lightnings rend the fervid pole
With frequent flash! his hurtling hail
Let Jove down-fling! hoarse Neptune flail
The stubborn rock, and give free reins
To his dark steeds with foamy manes
That paw the strand!—such wrathful fray
Touches not me, who, even as they,
Immortal tread this lowly sod,
Born of the gods a god.
II
Jove rules above; Fate willed it so.'Tis well; Prometheus rules below.
Their gusty game let wild winds play,
And clouds on clouds in thick array
Muster dark armies in the sky;
Be mine a harsher trade to ply,
This solid Earth, this rocky frame
To mould, to conquer, and to tame;
And to achieve the toilsome plan,
My workman shall be MAN.
III
The Earth is young. Even with these eyesI saw the molten mountains rise
From out the seething deep, while Earth
Shook at the portent of their birth.
I saw from out the primal mud
The reptiles crawl of dull cold blood,
While wingèd lizards with broad stare,
Peered through the raw and misty air.
Where then was Cretan Jove? where then
This king of gods and men?
IV
When naked from his mother EarthWeak and defenceless, man crept forth,
And on mis-tempered solitude
Of unploughed field, and unclipt wood
Gazed rudely; when with brutes he fed
On acorns; and his stony bed
In dark unwholesome caverns found;
No skill was then to till the ground,
No help came then from him above
This tyrannous-blustering Jove.
V
The Earth is young. Her latest birth,This weakling man, my craft shall girth
With cunning strength. Him I will take
And in stern arts my scholar make.
This smoking reed, in which I hold
The empyrean spark, shall mould
Rock and hard steel to use of man;
He shall be as a god to plan
And forge all things to his desire
By alchemy of fire.
VI
These jagged cliffs that flout the air,Harsh granite blocks so rudely bare,
Wise Vulcan's art and mine shall own
To piles of shapeliest beauty grown.
The steam that snorts vain strength away
Shall serve the workman's curious sway
Like a wise child; as clouds that sail
White-wing'd before the summer gale,
The smoking chariot o'er the land
Shall roll, at his command.
VII
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! my homeStands firm beneath Jove's rattling dome,
This stable Earth. Here let me work!
The busy spirits, that eager lurk
Within a thousand labouring breasts,
Here let me rouse; and whoso rests
From labour let him rest from life.
To live 's to strive; and in the strife
To move the rock, and stir the clod,
Man makes himself a god.
| Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece, with Other Poems | |