The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley

III.

THE DRAMA AS A WORK OF ART.

IT is a thankless task to “unweave a rainbow.” The iridescent beauty of Shelley’s poems stimulates the spirit of joy rather than that of analysis. The historic position and inner meaning of a poem may be made clearer by comment, but its charm as a work of art vanishes on close inspection, as the lights in a dewdrop die out under the microscope.

Thus, the few suggestions which we shall make about the artistic value of the Prometheus Unbound will advance no claim to completeness; they will be meant to quicken receptivity rather than to guide analysis.

The quality of a poet’s work is in large measure determined by his temperament. This, true of all poets, is especially true of Shelley, whose poetry is subtly pervaded by his personality. Now, the chief notes of Shelley’s temperament are two, — an intense sensitiveness and a passion for change. Like Browning’s St. John, the soul of Shelley

He describes his own dominant mood in the words of the Spirit of the Hour: —

This poignant sensitiveness leads him to a marvelous fineness of perception, but his passion for change determines the sphere within which his perception shall act. Keats is as responsive to subtle sense -impressions as Shelley; Wordsworth’s eye and ear have a fairy fineness. But Wordsworth and Keats alike, in different ways, — Wordsworth from spiritual, Keats from æsthetic instinct, — reflect most readily moods of repose. They love to dwell on themes of peace, on an “ Attic shape, fair attitude,” on the calm of mountain or forest. Shelley’s genius is of a different order. He is the poet of motion, of half-tints and passing moods. His glancing restlessness makes him the interpreter of all that is fugitive in nature and in the mind of man. He is possessed by the vision of that elusive loveliness which comes but in flashes, and vanishes, for most of us, almost before it is beheld.

Nowhere do we find so perfect an expression of Shelley’s nature as in the Prometheus Unbound. The drama is to the heaven of his soul as

It has a dreamlike beauty, due largely to its delicate responsiveness to every fleeting shade of feeling and of thought. Every simile shows the nature to which the unseen is clearer than the seen. The wind shakes clinging music from the pine boughs, —

and spring comes “ like the memory of a dream.” Every epithet— the “ unpastured sea,” the “thunder-baffled wings” of the eagle, the “ tempest -wrinkled deep”—darts swiftly to the heart of fact. Less sonorous than the solemnfreighted words of Milton, Shelley’s descriptive phrases are lighter, keener, purer. Less charged with human passion than the full dramatic epithets of Shakespeare, they have a power to reveal which is all their own. The little lyrics interspersed through the poem are the most ethereal ever written, — brief swallow-flights of song that wing their way through the sky of the drama, vibrating with swift rhythmic motion. Such are the lovely little poems, “ In the atmosphere we breathe,” “On a poet’s lips I slept, “The path by which these lovely twain.” In glancing idealism, in mystic suggestion, these lyrics recall a genius strangely akin to that of Shelley, though seldom associated with it, — the genius of Emerson.

Every one agrees that the Prometheus Unbound contains much wonderful poetry ; but far more can be said of it than this. The drama is no mere succession of exquisite details. It manifests nobly that “high architectonic power” which Matthew Arnold tells us must always accompany complete dramatic development. Even Shelley’s lovers do not claim this quality for him as fully as they might. Ruskin calls the power the imagination associative. Call it what we will, it is the power that unites many imperfect parts into a perfect and organic whole. This, Arnold explains, is the faculty which presides at the evolution of a great tragedy, an Agamemnon or an Antigone. Comparatively simple in manifestation through the tragic drama of the Greeks, it finds full expression in the complex yet organic construction of the Shakespearean drama. In most of Shelley’s poems, devoid as they are of dramatic elements, there is perhaps no place for such a power. His minor lyrics are but a single strain, though sometimes, as in the Ode to the West Wind, the varied development of the emotional theme through a noble sequence of stanzas gives to the poem an inward harmony which suggests high constructive instinct. The Adonais, again, is finely organized, though the articulation of parts is here somewhat artificial, owing to the closeness with which the poem follows classic models. But in Prometheus Unbound Shelley finally and completely vindicates his claim to the architectonic faculty. He has not the Shakespearean power of dramatic construction, involving the clash of character with event; neither has he precisely the instinct for philosophical unity shown in the noble development of thought-experience in Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Shelley’s power is more akin to that of the musician. From a single melodic theme he evolves a vast whole of ordered harmony. The Prometheus Unbound is like a symphony where the music, exquisite at every point, is modulated with wondrous beauty and subtlety into a grandly progressive whole. To translate the drama into terms of music is indeed a fascinating and feasible experiment. The unity of the poem, then, since akin to the unity of music, is primarily emotional; and surely no emotional theme was ever discovered wider in scope or fuller of varied imaginative suggestion than that of this drama of redemption.

Each act of the Prometheus centres in a distinct phase of the one theme. The first act, expressing the calm of proud endurance, is swayed towards the middle by an agony still passive, and at the end sinks into the peace of exhaustion.

The second act is one of hope and promise. It the first centres in endurance, this centres in action. The spirit of life breathes through every line. Faint at first, as Asia waits in lovely passiveness, it gradually grows more eager, stronger, till it culminates in that marvelous lyric which brings us close to Goethe’s Werdelust, the creative rapture of the soul of the world. The third act is the calm of fulfillment, as the first was the calm of endurance. In the fourth act, the full pæan of triumph sweeps us along with tumultuous and unequaled harmony.

These moods — enduring expectation, life slowly quickened to full activity, fulfillment, and triumph — find expression not alone through the thought of the poem, but through its form. They interpenetrate its very structure, and mould every line of its verse. The treatment of nature, the use made of light and color, the melody, are all determined by them; and in studying the drama we must remember that each detail, however lovely in itself, gains inexpressibly from its relation to the whole.

It is in the treatment of nature that the distinctive powers of Shelley’s poetry are most clearly seen. The Prometheus Unbound is in one sense a nature-drama. The Soul of Nature is herself one of the personages. We are transported from the wildest mountain scenery to the luxuriance of tropical valleys. Sky-cleaving peaks, glaciers, precipices, vast rivers, lakes, forests, meet us on every page. We have a sense that the drama is for the most part enacted on the heights, where the air is pure from earthly taint, and heaven and earth seem to blend. The sky scenery, above all, with its pomp and gloom of storm, its sunrise and sunset, its “flocks of clouds in spring’s delightful weather, " is as great as can be found in English poetry; yet the bold outline work, the strong and broad treatment of the vaster aspects of nature, reveal the poet less than the rendering of delicate detail, of fleeting sights and sounds lost on a grosser perception.

The sensitiveness and passion for change which we have seen to be the notes of Shelley’s temperament are evident in everyone of these passages. His imagination always plays upon exquisitely accurate perception. It is doubtful whether any poet before our century, whatever his equipment, could so closely and finely have rendered the minutiæ of nature. Shelley’s treatment of nature always springs, not from the dull observation of the scientist, but from the vision-faculty of the seer ; yet he has a marvelous power of grasping detail and rendering it with swift precision, — a power which perhaps no poet who had not felt the first breath of the spirit of modern science could have known. Again and again Shelley seizes a definite scientific conception or phenomenon, and renders it with truthfulness none the less great because touched with the interpretative power of the dynamic imagination. The little biography of a dewdrop, just given, is a charming instance ; another is found in a passage where the force of gravitation and the revolution of the moon round the earth are superbly expressed as emotional symbols. The Moon addresses the Earth : —

The rest of the passage is too beautiful to omit; and it suggests at once the marvelous use of color which is one of Shelley’s chief ways of spiritualizing and vitalizing his nature-picture.

It is only in the nineteenth century that the poets have become great colorists ; and no one but Keats can in this respect rival the greatness of Shelley. If Keats has more force of color, Shelley has more purity. Keats’s coloring is opaque, though brilliant, like that of a butterfly’s wing ; Shelley’s is translucent, like an opal. Ruskin tolls us that nature always paints her loveliest hues on aqueous or crystalline matter ; and the very law of nature seems to be the instinct of Shelley. Rainbow lights, keen, swift, and pure, play through the Prometheus. The color flashes and is gone. To choose separate passages for illustration is to withdraw a cluster of blossoms from the shimmering world of rain and sunshine into the dead light of a library; one short passage will show the delicacy, subtlety, and transparency of tints that Shelley loved : —

But the color in Prometheus Unhound has a higher function than to vivify the detail of the poem or to give us a series of exquisite vignettes. The drama, by the use of light and color, is shaped to an organic whole. It shows the harmonious evolution of a central theme ; and this evolution is symbolically presented through the progress of the new cosmic day. The drama opens with night. In darkness, lit by the moonbeams of Hope and Memory, the Titan, glacier-bound, hangs

Slowly the “wingless, crawling hours” pass on. The Phantasm of Jupiter, “clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven,” is a very incarnation of the night. With the approach of Mercury comes the first promise of the dawn ; that, faint flush of color in the east which may be seen hours before sunrise, gathering dim purple and solemn crimson out of the very substance of the darkness and the void.

The delusive promise is not fulfilled. From the east again sweeps up the thunder-cloud of the Furies,

The storm covers the heavens with a gloom deeper than that of midnight, which yet shadows forth but faintly the spiritual darkness that enwraps the Titan’s soul. Flashes of lightning reveal the lurid visions of the world’s moments of keenest pain. At last the tempest spends its force, the clouds melt away, and the “blue air” holds fresh promise of the day to be. The wings of the spirits of consolation gather like filmy, shining clouds.

The exquisite twilight of dawn enfolds us ; and with the paling of the morning star the act concludes. For the deepening of the sunrise into its full glory we must turn to the expectant heart of Love.

The beginning of the second act gives us the fullest blaze of color in the whole poem, though the triumph of purest light is to follow. This sunrise picture seems painted in the hues of the sky itself. Its greatest marvel lies in its swift transitions, the tremulous passage of loveliness from glory to glory. Only the soul of a Turner among painters could behold such a vision, and the brush of a Turner could give us but one arrested moment, while Shelley reveals the whole unfolding of the morning even as we gaze.

From this time the fresh light of morning shines more and more clearly through the poem. It is possible, indeed, with some critics, notably James Thomson, to contend that the second and third acts occupy several days ; but though there are certain technical reasons for adopting this view, the points on which Shelley concentrates our attention are the moments of dawn, and the æsthetic effect of the poem centres in the gathering light. We feel this growing radiance with peculiar power where Asia and Panthea, breathing the pure air of the heights, watch below their feet the curling, brilliant, sunlit mists which veil the abode of Demogorgon. Again, for a short space, we descend to the region of shadows, and, standing before the throne of Demogorgon, perceive

So dense is the gloom that the sister spirits, looking upward, see the stars in the morning sky. Then, with abrupt and breathless transition, we are whirled to the final height of vision and the consummation of the drama. The apotheosis of Asia gives us the intense fullness of white light, the high noon of the great cosmic day. Shelley’s mysticism has introduced one or two confusing lines ; but his thought, evidently, is that the physical day has yielded to the new spiritual order, and that the rising of the material sun is superseded, at least in this great moment, by the rising of the sun of love. At this point the development of the theme of the Day is practically dropped, and the light, except for one or two minor suggestions, is constant; the implication perhaps being that in the evolution of human destiny we have readied at last the era of unshadowed bliss, which stoops not to evening.

The supreme aesthetic glory of the Prometheus Unbound is not its nature descriptions, nor its treatment of light and color, but its music. Never did melody so enfold the spirit of a poet. The form is transparent and supple as flame. The technical range of melody in the drama is wonderful. Thirtyseven distinctly different verse-forms are to be found in it. Blank verse rises into the long, passionate swing of the anapest, or is broken by the flutelike notes of short trochaic lines, or relieved by the half - lyrical effect of rhymed endings. The verse lends itself with equal suppleness to the grandeur of sustained endurance, to the passionate yearning of love, to severe philosophic inquiry, to the ethereal notes of spirit voices dying on the wind. Most of the verse-forms are simple, but at times the schemes are as complex as those of the most elaborate odes of Dryden or Collins. Yet the artificial and labored beauty of eighteenth-century verse is replaced, in Shelley, by song spontaneous as that of his own skylark. The conventions of poetry have been entirely swept away by the new democracy. We may apply to Shelley, and indeed to the typical poet of the modern world, the noble line

Not only in Shelley’s lyrics do we find marvelous variety of movement ; his blank verse itself has no monotony, and the range of his power can in no way be better illustrated than by the different kinds of music which he is able to draw from an instrument technically unchanged. This may be seen at once by comparing the opening soliloquies of Prometheus and of Asia. The passages have already been quoted ; their music is entirely different in quality. In the speech of Prometheus, consonant strikes hard on consonant, and the vowel-coloring is scant and cold. The lines have a sonorous pomp, derived in part from their austere majesty of epithet, in part from the note of sternly repressed passion. But into the words of Asia has passed something of the soft air and light of the springtide which she sings. The melody has a prolonged and gentle sweetness, which might be languid were it not for the sparkle of delicate life that animates the whole. The same distinction of quality may always he felt, in the best utterances of Prometheus and of Asia. Jupiter, again, speaks with a proud accent all his own : —

This monologue has a certain harsh, metallic ring, mingled with a fullness of vowel-color quite different from the pure, quiet, and strong utterance of Prometheus. To Deniogorgon’s speeches Shelley has not, I think, succeeded in imparking a distinct cadence. He says little, and his few speeches are commonplace as poetry, though at times suggestive as thought. Any poet of the third order could have written —

Probably even Shelley found it difficult to impart individual accent to the words of a “mighty darkness.”

Of all these different types of blank verse, there is one most intimately characteristic of Shelley. We find it always in the speeches of Asia, sometimes elsewhere. Miltonic echoes sound through the words of Prometheus and Jupiter ; but there is a cadence of which Shelley alone is master, — a cadence unique in haunting, clinging melody’.

In lines like these Shelley has drawn a new music from English words.

Even the blank verse of Shelley holds a subtle lyrical cry ; but it is the sweep and variety of direct lyrical modulation which first arrest the reader of the Prometheus Unbound. There is no rigid distinction in the use of metre, yet the major characters of the drama use, as a rule, the plain recitative, while lone, Panthea, and the other chorus characters generally sing rather than speak. These chorus characters, or rather chorus voices, enhance strangely the imaginative power of the drama. Again and again they are heard at critical moments. coming from an unseen source; and the unearthly beauty of their songsnatches thrills us with the sense that we listen to elemental creatures, too fine for discernment by any sense grosser than that of sound. The whole creation, invisible as well as visible, seems thus to share in the spiritual action of the poem and to echo its passion. These aerial spirit voices are first heard in Act I., when the Earth-mother, yet unenlightened, bemoans Prometheus’ retractation of the curse.

Here we have the impression of the powers of nature, ethereal yet unspiritual, unable to apprehend the higher attitude of regenerate man. But the most exquisite instance of this fairylike use of the lyrical interlude is in that first scene of the second act, already quoted, where all nature, becoming vocal with spirit voices, whispers and sings its quickening message. These tiny lyrics can be compared to nothing but the Ariel songs in The Tempest. They have the same light trochaic movement, sacred, in Shakespeare and Shelley, to fairy suggestion ; they have the same dainty and elusive grace. Perhaps the singing of the wind in pine branches, and the lovely inarticulate rise and fall of the sounds of nature in a spring morning, ring through the songs of Shelley’s echoes even mure sweetly than through the songs of Shakespeare’s tricksy sprite.

ECHOES.

ECHOES.

ECHOES.

In the last act of the Prometheus Unbound the spirit voices have it all their own way. Their music, from an undertone, has become dominant, and they blend in one grand diapason of harmony to express the rapture of a creation redeemed to the freedom of new and perfect life.

Shelley’s power in handling his instrument will become clearer if we follow, very briefly, the consecutive metrical changes in the drama. As a rule, the blank verse marks passages of transition or of repressed feeling, while at every climax of passion the poetry rushes into lyrical form. The first introduction of the lyric follows the opening soliloquy of Prometheus. He calls on the powers of nature to repeat to him the forgotten curse. They respond and deny in lyrical lines, where trochees, iambics, and anapests blend; and though horror deepens through the images of carnage which the words present, relief is afforded, after the stern self-repression of Prometheus, by the free beauty of the verse-movement. The lyric next appears where lone and Pantliea, whose voices are now heard for the first time, herald the approach of the Phantasm of Jupiter.

As the pain of the whole world presses upon the spirit of Prometheus, the music deepens in grandeur and solemnity. The grievous terror of the visions beheld by the Titan is subdued by the weird melody which ebbs and flows with the theme. Yet not in lyric, but in blank verse is reached the climax of the revelation of sorrow, and in blank verse does Prometheus utter his cry of supreme anguish. Shelley doubtless here suggests the quietness of the deepest horror in life. As the pain subsides, and the weary hut triumphant Titan sinks into repose, the tension of the verse relaxes.

These lines, heralding the fair spirits of the human mind, afford exquisite relief by the mere introduction of rhyme ; and the lyrics of consolation that follow have a serene and tender beauty of movement all their own.

Of certain portions of the music in the second act we have already spoken. “ Shelley has here,” says Todhnnter, “ made English blank verse the native language of elemental genii.” The lyrics are more frequent, and interpenetrate the whole structure more, than in the first act. The journey of Asia and Pantliea is like a great processional, accompanied by a chant, which now rises, now falls, upon the wind. The semi-choruses that sing the advance of the sister spirits have doubtless a mystical meaning; they have also an imaginative beauty, like that of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, but the music has a less heavy richness and a more flutelike tone.

SEMI-CHORUS I. OF SPIRITS.

The longest passage of blank verse in the act is the discussion between Demogorgon and Asia, which is purely intellectual. As soon as emotion and action reappear the verse breaks into the song of the Spirit of the Hour. This lyric, interrupted as it is by the end of the scene, and ended in the fifth scene, gives a wonderful impression of haste. The fiery and ethereal coursers indeed " drink the hot speed of desire.” The fifth scene, the apotheosis of Asia, touches the highwater mark of the English lyric. The scene corresponds in passion to the scene with the Furies, in the first act. As that was hate, this is love ; as that was darkness, this is light; as that was supreme horror, so this is supreme rapture. The great lyric, “ Life of Life,” is simple as a ray of white sunlight is simple. Asia’s response is a wonderful whole of subtly interwoven harmonies.

The third act, as we have already said, is attuned to the music of peace. But Shelley is less fitted to render this music than to sing of desire, or even of endurance. Not only spiritually, hut artistically, the second act is the finest in the drama. Yet the third act has certain passages of tranquil music beautiful in its way, — music no longer, as in the first act, breathing the tense calm of pain and scorn, but inspired by the free serenity of joy. Such is the lovely little scene between Apollo and Ocean, which is Hellenic in its pure repose.

The fourth act defies comment. A triumphant paean of enfranchised nature, it is so bewildering in complex structure, so intricate in harmony, so remote from all human interest, that complete sympathy with it is perhaps impossible. Yet doubtless the act as a whole marks the most sustained achievement of English lyricism. The music with which it opens is light, almost too light, perhaps, as the Hours, past and future, and the spirits of the human mind, join in joyful choruses of thankful glee.

Soon the theme widens. The “deep music of the rolling world ” is heard, and the pauses are filled with “clear, silvery, icy, keen-awakening tones.” We listen to a solemn involution of harmony in the grand antiphon of rejoicing between the Earth and the Moon. The music of the Earth is grave, rich, full, exultant; the Moon answers as from afar, with a tender and wistful cadence, — the same as that of the Earth, only shortened by a foot, and hence transfigured in effect.

The act and the drama conclude with an organ-roll of harmony like that of the Ode to the West Wind. Demogorgon, the mystic Living Spirit, the power no longer of destruction, but of love, solemnly invokes all natural and spiritual forces to listen ; and when, in answering music, they attest their presence, and we feel the harmony of the redeemed creation speaking through their words, he utters in cadence grave and serene his final message. It is the message of courage and of hope. The quiet dignity and seriousness of the lines justly conclude that music which may at times have seemed lawless and fantastic, yet. which has always, in its most passionate abandon, yielded allegiance to the law of perfect beauty.

Thus we have tried to suggest something of the poetic power of Shelley as revealed in the Prometheus Unbound. The hold on concrete human life of a Shakespeare or a Browning Shelley did not possess ; nor was there granted to him the serene insight of Wordsworth nor the philosophic method of Tennyson. But his exquisitely equipped temperament, sensitive in every fibre, enabled him to express those finest aspects of nature where visible trembles into invisible, and those finest aspects of emotion where rapture and sorrow blend ; he has the power to sing melodies which seem echoes of unearthly music ; and his sweep of spiritual apprehension reveals to him the solemn vision of human destiny as an ordered and harmonious whole. The Ode to the West Wind was written in the same year with the Prometheus Unbound; may not the aspiration of the poem have been connected in Shelley’s mind with his desires for his great drama ?

We cannot help connecting the two in our own thought. " The tumult of the mighty harmonies " of nature has passed into the Prometheus Unbound. We feel, as we read the drama, that Shelley’s prayer has been fulfilled. A spirit greater than his own has been, through his lips, to unawakened earth, the trumpet of a prophecy.

Vida D. Scudder.