through youth and infancy and then return to announce his victory and the defeat birth, in order to die to this life and be born again of the resistance of Prometheus. to a 'diviner' existence. 8. Of Prometheus's defiance. 5. Of the same age. 9. Skillfully wrought (from the name of the Greek 6. 'It' (as also in lines 14 and 16) is 'the soul of craftsman Daedalus). Ganymede (line 25) had man' (line 5). been seized on Mount Ida by an eagle and carried 7. The son of Jupiter and Thetis. Jupiter believes to heaven to be Jupiter's cupbearer.
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81 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Ye all triumphant harmonies arise As dew from Earth under the twilight stars; Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins The soul of joy, ye everliving Gods, Till exultation burst in one wide voice Like music from Elysian winds.?
And thou Ascend beside me, veiled in the light Of the desire which makes thee one with me, Thetis, bright Image of Eternity!? When thou didst cry, 'Insufferable might!1 God! spare me! I sustain not the quick flames, The penetrating presence; all my being, Like him whom the Numidian seps2 did thaw Into a dew with poison, is dissolved, Sinking through its foundations'?even then Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third Mightier than either?which unbodied now Between us, floats, felt although unbeheld, Waiting the incarnation, which ascends? Hear ye the thunder of the fiery wheels Griding3 the winds??from Demogorgon's throne.? Victory! victory! Feel'st thou not, O World, The Earthquake of his chariot thundering up Olympus?
[The Car of the HOUR arrives, DEMOGORGON descends and moves towards the Throne of JUPITER.]
Awful Shape, what art thou? Speak!
DEMOGORGON Eternity?demand no direr name. Descend, and follow me down the abyss; I am thy child,4 as thou wert Saturn's child, Mightier than thee; and we must dwell together Henceforth in darkness.?Lift thy lightnings not. The tyranny of Heaven none may retain, Or reassume, or hold succeeding thee . . . Yet if thou wilt?as 'tis the destiny Of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead? Put forth thy might.
JUPITE R Detested prodigy! Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons5 I trample thee! . . . thou lingerest?
Mercy! mercy! No pity?no release, no respite! . . . Oh, That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge. Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge On Caucasus?he would not doom me thus.?
1. This description of Jupiter's rape of Thetis is a 4. Ironically, and in a figurative sense: Demogorgrotesque parody of the reunion of Prometheus gon's function follows from Jupiter's actions. and Asia. 5. After they overthrew the Titans, Jupiter and the 2. A serpent of Numidia (North Africa) whose bite Olympian gods imprisoned them in Tartarus, deep was thought to cause putrefaction. beneath the earth. 3. Cutting with a rasping sound.
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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 811
Gentle and just and dreadless, is he not
The monarch of the world? what then art thou? . . .
No refuge! no appeal? . . .
Sink with me then?
We two will sink in the wide waves of ruin
Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,6
Into a shoreless sea.?Let Hell unlock
Its mounded Oceans of tempestuous fire,
And whelm on them? into the bottomless void wash them
The desolated world and thee and me,
The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck
Of that for which they combated.
Ai! Ai!7
The elements obey me not ... I sink . . .
Dizzily down?ever, forever, down?
And, like a cloud, mine enemy above
Darkens my fall with victory!?Ai! Ai!
From SCENE 4? A Forest. In the Background a Cave. PROMETHEUS, ASIA,
PAN
THEA, IONE, and the SPIRIT OF THE EARTH.8
$ $ *
[The enters.]
SPIRIT OF THE HOUR
PROMETHEUS We feel what thou hast heard and seen?yet speak.
SPIRIT OF THE HOUR Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the sky, and the wide earth,
