feel it most Are happier still, after long sufferings As I shall soon become.
PANTHEA List! Spirits speak.
VOICE
(in the air, singing)3
Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes.
1. In an earlier scene Panthea had envisioned in a dream the radiant and eternal inner form of Prometheus emerging through his 'wound-worn limbs.' The corresponding transfiguration of Asia, prepared for by her descent to the underworld to question Demogorgon, now takes place. 2. The story told by the Nereids (sea nymphs) serves to associate Asia with Aphrodite, goddess of love, emerging (as in Botticelli's painting) from the Mediterranean on a seashell.
3. The voice attempts to describe, in a dizzying whirl of optical paradoxes, what it feels like to look on the naked essence of love and beauty.
.
80 8 / PERC Y BYSSH E SHELLE Y Child of Light! thy limbs are burning 55 Through the vest which seems to hide them As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds ere they divide them, And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 60 Fair are others;?none beholds thee But thy voice sounds low and tender Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never 65 As I feel now, lost forever! Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness 70 Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost . . . yet unbewailing! ASIA My soul is an enchanted Boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing, 75 And thine doth like an Angel sit Beside the helm conducting it Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. It seems to float ever?forever? Upon that many winding River so Between mountains, woods, abysses, A Paradise of wildernesses, Till like one in slumber bound Borne to the Ocean, I float down, around, Into a Sea profound, of ever-spreading sound. Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions0 In Music's most serene dominions, Catching the winds that fan that happy Heaven. And we sail on, away, afar, Without a course?without a star? 90 But by the instinct of sweet Music driven Till, through Elysian garden islets By thee, most beautiful of pilots, Where never mortal pinnace0 glided, The boat of my desire is guided? Bealms where the air we breathe is Love Which in the winds and on the waves doth move, Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above. We have past Age's icy caves, And Manhood's dark and tossing waves
wings
small boat
.
PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 80 9
And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray;
Beyond the glassy gulphs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth to a diviner day,4
A Paradise of vaulted bowers
Lit by downward-gazing flowers
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld?somewhat like thee,
Which walk upon the sea, and chaunt melodiously!
From Act 3
SCENE 1?Heaven, on his Throne; THETIS and the other Deities assem
JUPITER
bled.
JUPITE R Ye congregated Powers of Heaven who share The glory and the strength of him ye serve, Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent. All else had been subdued to me?alone The soul of man, like unextinguished fire, Yet burns towards Heaven with fierce reproach and doubt And lamentation and reluctant prayer, Hurling up insurrection, which might make Our antique empire insecure, though built On eldest faith, and Hell's coeval,3 fear. And though my curses through the pendulous0 air overhanging Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake And cling to it6?though under my wrath's night It climb the crags of life, step after step, Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet, It yet remains supreme o'er misery, Aspiring . . . unrepressed; yet soon to fall: Even now have I begotten a strange wonder, That fatal Child,7 the terror of the Earth, Who waits but till the destined Hour arrive, Bearing from Demogorgon's vacant throne The dreadful might of ever living limbs Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld? To redescend, and trample out the spark8 . . .
Pour forth Heaven's wine, Idaean Ganymede,
And let it fill the daedal9 cups like fire
And from the flower-inwoven soil divine
4. Asia is describing what it feels like to be trans-that he has begotten a child who will assume the figured?in the image of moving backward in the bodily form of the conquered Demogorgon and stream of time,
