Lord Byron - Prometheus (poetry reading with text)

Описание: A reading of the poem that George Gordon Byron wrote in celebration of Prometheus, the titan from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods to give it to humans. For this transgression, the gods punished him by chaining him to a mountain where an eagle would come to eat his liver, that would then grow back, to be devoured again the following day, until he was finally freed by Hercules. Prometheus symbolizes the rebellious individual using the fire of knowledge to enlighten and empower himself as well as others to face the hardships of the human condition and to fight against the tyranny of ignorance and oppressive social orders.

Prometheus is an example of the Byronic hero, a solitary, brooding character that acts in a defiant manner, rejecting the dominant values of his society, facing great suffering, but ultimately doomed to fail. In this specific case, though, Prometheus can be seen as having succeeded, because he accomplished his mission of bringing the forbidden fire to humans, albeit at a terrible personal cost.

The Greek titan was also featured at the centre of another important work of literature from the Romantic period: "Prometheus Unbound" (1820), a lyrical drama by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The poem was first published in 1816.
Text taken from "The Works of Lord Byron" (ed. Coleridge, Prothero, 1905).

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"Prometheus" by George Gordon Byron

I.

Titan! to whose immortal eyes
⁠The sufferings of mortality,
⁠Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,⁠
⁠Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

II.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
⁠Between the suffering and the will,
⁠Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,⁠
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refused thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine—and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;⁠
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

III.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
⁠To render with thy precepts less
⁠The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,⁠
In the endurance, and repulse
⁠Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
⁠A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
⁠To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
⁠A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;⁠
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—an equal to all woes—
⁠And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
⁠Its own concentered recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.