Remains of them, like the Omnipotence Of music when the inspired voice and lute Languish, ere yet the responses are mute Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul, Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll. PROMETHEU S 8io815How fair these air-born shapes! and yet I feel Most vain all hope but love, and thou art far, Asia! who when my being overflowed Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust. All things are still?alas! how heavily This quiet morning weighs upon my heart; Though I should dream, I could even sleep with grief If slumber were denied not .. . I would fain 820Be what it is my destiny to be, The saviour and the strength of suffering man, Or sink into the original gulph of things. . . . There is no agony and no solace left; Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more. PANTHEA Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when The shadow of thy spirit falls on her?
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80 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
PROMETHEUS
I said all hope was vain but love?thou lovest . . .
PANTHEA
Deeply in truth?but the Eastern star looks white,
And Asia waits in that far Indian vale,
The scene of her sad exile?rugged once
And desolate and frozen like this ravine;
But now invested with fair flowers and herbs
And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow
Among the woods and waters, from the ether' purer air
Of her transforming presence?which would fade
If it were mingled not with thine.?Farewell!
From Act 2
SCENE 4?The Cave of DEMOGORGON. ASLA AND PANTHEA.3
PANTHEA What veiled form sits on that ebon throne? ASLA The veil has fallen! . . . PANTHEA I see a mighty Darkness
Filling the seat of power; and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian Sun,
Ungazed upon and shapeless?neither limb
Nor form?nor outline;4 yet we feel it is
A living Spirit.
DEMOGORGON Ask what thou wouldst know. ASIA What canst thou tell? DEMOGORGON All things thou dar'st demand. ASIA Who made the living world? DEMOGORGON God . ASIA Who made all
That it contains?thought, passion, reason, will,
Imagination? DEMOGORGON God, Almighty God. ASIA Who made that sense5 which, when the winds of Spring
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one beloved heard in youth alone,
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears, which dim
The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,
And leaves this peopled earth a solitude
When it returns no more?
3. Act 2 has opened with Asia?the feminine principle and embodiment of love, who was separated from Prometheus at the moment of his fall into divisive hate?in a lovely Indian valley at the first hour of the dawn of the spring season of redemption. Asia and her sister Panthea have been led, by a sweet and irresistible compulsion, first to the portal and then down into the depths of the cave of Demogorgon?the central enigma of Shelley's poem. As the father of all that exists, Demogorgon may represent the ultimate reason for the way things
are. As such, Shelley appears to argue, Demogorgon must be a mystery inaccessible to knowledge and must be ignorant of the principle controlling him. In this scene Demogorgon can give only riddling answers to Asia's questions about the 'why' of creation, good, and evil.
4. Echoing Milton's description of Death, Paradise Lost 2.666-73. 5. Presumably the sense by which one is aware of the 'unseen Power' that Shelley calls 'Intellectua1 Beauty' (see 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,' stanza 2, p. 766).
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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 80 3
DEMOGORGON Merciful God.
ASIA And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse, Which from the links of the great chain of things To every thought within the mind of man Sway and drag heavily?and each one reels Under the load towards the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate; And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood; Pain whose unheeded and familiar speech Is howling and keen shrieks, day after day; And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?6
