"Monarch of gods and demons, and all spirits But one, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes!... Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours, And moments aye divided by keen pangs Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, Scorn and despair,--these are mine empire, More glorious far than that which thou surveyest From thine unenvied throne!"
Here we have the purely spiritual torments of "solitude, scorn and despair" set before us; though Shelley retains and even multiplies the physical torments of Æschylus. A few lines further on, in this same long opening speech of Prometheus, we have them thus described:
"Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
... The earthquake fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind; While from their wild abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail."
And presently, when after the repulse of Mercury Jove begins to stir up new terrors, we hear Ione exclaiming:
"O, sister, look! white fire Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar; How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!"
But even in Shelley's array of these terrors we perceive a cunning outcrop of modernness in a direction which I have not yet mentioned but which we will have frequent occasion to notice when we come to read the modern novel together; and that is in the detail of the description Æschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, and three sweeps of it; Shelley itemizes them.
It is worth while observing too, that the same spirit of detail in modern criticism forces us to convict Shelley here of an inconsistency in his scene; for how could this "snow-loaded cedar" of Ione exist with propriety in a scene which Prometheus himself has just described as "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life?"
The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of the torment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself a little farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in this same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful curse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seem that in order to recall it he wishes to hear the exact words of it. "What was that curse?"--he exclaims at the end of the speech; "for ye all heard me speak." To this question we have page after page of replies from five voices--namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of the Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth--embodying such a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surely have drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term of manhood.