There was a change . . . the impalpable thin air
And the all-circling sunlight were transformed
As if the sense of love dissolved in them
Had folded itself round the sphered world.
My vision then grew clear and I could see
Into the mysteries of the Universe.9
Dizzy as with delight I floated down,
Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes,
My coursers sought their birthplace in the sun
Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil,
Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire?
And where my moonlike car will stand within
A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms,1
Of thee, and Asia and the Earth, and me
And you fair nymphs, looking the love we feel,
In memory of the tidings it has borne,
6. The eagle (or vulture) and the snake locked in what happened in the human world when he equal combat?a favorite Shelleyan image (cf. sounded the apocalyptic trumpet. Alastor, lines 227-32, p. 752). 9. I.e., the earth's atmosphere clarifies, no longer 7. Traditional Greek cry of sorrow. refracting the sunlight, and so allows the Spirit of 8. After Jupiter's annihilation (described in scene the Hour to see what is happening on earth. 2), Hercules unbinds Prometheus, who is reunited I. The crescent-shaped ('moonlike') chariot, its with Asia and retires to a cave 'where we will apocalyptic mission accomplished, will be frozen sit and talk of time and change /. . . ourselves to stone and will be surrounded by the sculptured unchanged.' In the speech that concludes the act forms of other agents in the drama. Phidias (5th (reprinted here) the Spirit of the Hour describes century B.C.E.) was the noblest of Greek sculptors.
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81 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers, Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone And open to the bright and liquid sky. Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake2
120 The likeness of those winged steeds will mock3 The flight from which they find repose.?Alas, Whither has wandered now my partial4 tongue When all remains untold which ye would hear!? As I have said, I floated to the Earth:
125 It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind And first was disappointed not to see SuCh mighty change as I had felt within
130 Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked, And behold! thrones were kingless, and men walked One with the other even as spirits do, None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain or fear, Self-love or self-contempt on human brows
135 No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here';5 None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear Gazed on another's eye of cold command Until the subject of a tyrant's will
140 Became, worse fate, the abject of his own6 Which spurred him, like an outspent? horse, to death. exhausted None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak; None with firm sneer trod out in his own heart
145 The sparks of love and hope, till there remained Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed, And the wretch crept, a vampire among men, Infecting all with his own hideous ill. None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk
i 50 Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy With such a self- mistrust as has no name. And women too, frank, beautiful and kind As the free Heaven which rains fresh light and dew
155 On the wide earth, past: gentle, radiant forms, From custom's evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel And changed to all which once they dared not be,
160 Yet being now, made Earth like Heaven?nor pride Nor jealousy nor envy nor ill shame,
2. A mythical snake with a head at each end; it 4. Biased or, possibly, telling only part of the story. serves here as a symbolic warning that a reversal 5. The inscription over the gate of hell in Dante's of the process is always possible. Inferno 3.9. 3. 'Imitate' and also, in their immobility, 'mock 6. I.e., he was so abjectly enslaved that his own at' the flight they represent. will accorded with the tyrant's will.
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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 81 3
The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall, Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe,7 love.
Thrones, altars, judgement-seats and prisons; wherein
165 And beside which, by wretched men were borne Sceptres, tiaras, swords and chains, and tomes Of reasoned wrong glozed on8 by ignorance, Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes, The ghosts of a no more remembered fame,
