PROMETHEUS UNBOUND: A Lyrical Drama is the greatest of Shelley's longer poems. This poem, begun in the autumn of 1818, was chiefly written? says Shelley, (in the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. . . . The bright blue sky of Rome and the effect of the vigorous awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama? This was his first experience of an Italian spring, and the reawakening of nature gave impulse and im agery to a vision of the rebirth of justice and happiness, on which the poet often fondly dwelt. That man could be so perfectionized? Mrs. Shelley notes,
to be able to expel evil from his own nature and from the greater part of creation, was the cardinal part of his sys tem.' The drama depicts this process in
ism borrowed from a Greek myth already dramatized by /F-schylus in the
patient endurance which is the present lot of goodness, so Act II depicts future progress toward a true philosophy. When wisdom is wholly dominated by love, and love accepts truth, the consummation of things is at hand. In Act III the denouement follows; Jupiter weds Thetis,— a union from which he expects some culminating advantage; instead, Demogor gon appears and drags him to the abyss. Pro metheus is set free and united to Asia. The intellect having attained its ideal, the emo tional nature being centred on the true, uthe Golden Years return.* This act concludes with a description of redeemed humanity. Act IV (an after-thought written at the close of 1819), is wholly lyrical, and reveals universal nature joying in a regenerate world. °No modern poet,* says Professor Herford, 'has come nearer making the morning stars sing to gether.° Act IV is a crowning example of tensity of emotion, tenuity of thought and poetic beauty. *The passages which are most thor oughly stripped of doctrine, of definite ideas, and even of humanity, are the most perfect of all, and Shelley is there most himself* (Elton).
This meagre outline, bare of all the beauty and passion of Shelley's poetry, is ludicrously incapable of suggesting the original. (Pro metheus,* while in some measure modeled on dEschylus, is, unlike it,— °a lyrical drama," an allegorical presentation of thoughts and feel ings. It has no characterization, save perhaps in the hero, nor any plot interest; such action as it has is difficult to follow. Its merits are of another order, and may be indicated in the words of William Rossetti: *There is, I sup pose, no poem comparable, in the fair sense of the word, to 'Prometheus The im mense scale and boundless scope of the con ception; the marble majesty and extramundane passions of the personages; the sublimity of ethical aspiration; the radiance of ideal and poetic beauty which saturates every phase of the subject, and almost, as it were, wraps it from sight at times, and transforms it out of sense into spirit; the rolling river of great sound and lyrical rapture; form a combination not to be matched elsewhere, and scarcely to encounter competition.* Consult Mrs. Shelley's Notes; Wm. Rossetti's paper in Shelley So ciety's Publications, 1886; Todhunter's Study of Shelley; Miss Vida Scudder's annotated edition.