User:Ottava Rima/Prometheus

Prometheus meaning
Bodkin

"defiant of human limitations" p. 192

Satan like Prometheus in his struggle against the universe, but looses it later on when he becomes an enemy to man. "The theme of his heroic strugge and endurance against hopeless odds wakens in poet and reader a sense of his own state as against the odds of his destiny". p. 234

"The same also as gives grandeur to the lines of the Prometheus dramas that tell of the mighty hero chained to the steep of the storm-beaten ravine, enduring, mountain-like amid the mountains, the Thunderer's vengeance." p. 238

"We must similarly recognize that within our actual experience the factors we distinguish are more massively intangible, more mutually incompatible and more insistent than they can appear as translated into reflective speech. Take, for example, the sense of sin imaginatively revived as we respond to Milton's presentation of Satan, or to the condemnation, suggested by Aeschylus' drama, of the rebellion of Prometheus in effecting the 'progress' of man. What in our analysis we might express as the thought that progress is evil or sinful, would, in the mind of Aeschylus, Abercromer comments, 'more likely be a shadowy relic of loyalty to the tribe' - a vague fear of anything that might weaken social solidarity. Not in the mind of Aeschylus only but in the mind of the reader of to-day" p. 243

"When we take our stand with Satan as Promethean hero, the image of God appears as alien despot, invincible only through the might of fire and thunder." p. 246

"Whatever may have been the exact significance in the mind of Aeschylus of the god depicted as Prometheus' antagonist, within poetic tradition this antagonist has become the symbol of Destiny, felt as a limitless hostile force confronting the individual will. We find it congruous that this aspect of Destiny should be expressed through the imagery of storm." p. 247

"The character of the god indicated in the opening scene of Prometheus Unbound invites comparison with the god whose image is communicated in the speeches of defiance in Paradise Lost and in the Prometheus Vinctus. The traditional mode of expression of God's wrath through the storm is present in Shelley's poem." p. 250

"Shelley's Jove no longer represents that immensity of Power, the irresistible force of Destiny overwhelming the resistant individual will, that is symbolized by the thunder-wielding tyrant of Prometheus Vinctus, and by the conqueror of Satan in Paradise Lost. Or if such a meaning remains as an element bequeathed from the ancient myth, still the emphasis of Shelley's treatment is upon a different aspect." pp. 251-252

"In Milton's story of the overthrow of Satan, and perhaps also in Aeschylus' representation of the punishment of Prometheus, the power called God has a double aspect. It appears external and alien, as the storm is alien to men and to human values, and again, it appears akin to some force within the mind maintaining recognized values against mutinous impulse - the force of Reason or Conscience. It is this aspect of God, as an inward governing force projected in an image, that Shelley's poem makes evident, both in the transparently psychological laanguage of the lines we have quoted - where the cosmic tyrant is said to rule the mutinous powers of Hell as man's spirit within his breast rules them - and also in the experience communicated by the whole course of the poem." p. 252

"In Shelley's poem, as in those of Coleridge and Dante, the sensuous imagery is felt as but the shadow of an inward bondage and desolation, which Shelley has made explicit in the thoughts of impotent anguish thrust upon Prometheus by the Furies.

"In Shelley's poem the anguish of the phase of bondage is in part expressed as the exile of Prometheus from Asia, his beloved." p. 253

Life of Life song celebrates Shelley's "Intellectual Beauty", a divine power that Shelley worshiped. p. 253

"When Asia and Panthea - figures expressive of the love, the imaginative power, and faith, of the poet's soul - are pictured as descending to question the ruler of the depths, we recognize, it seems to me, another rendering of the same type-pattern" (same as Dante and Aeneas) p. 254

"Within that pattern the questioning of Demogorgon leads on to the fall of the tyrant and the freeing of Prometheus by the same kind of imaginative necessity that is felt in Dante's ascent through Purgatory to Heaven, following upon his passage through the realm of the lost people.

Recognizing the identity of type-pattern, we may note the significant differences of rendering. The descend to the depths, as Shelley pictures it, communicates no sense of sin or horror. The horror and oppression has been endured already by Prometheus... Anger, even against wrong, has been subdued. The spirit moves to its last questioning of the depths in utter surrender." pp. 254-255

"If this account be accepted of the sequence expressed by Shelley's myth, the figure to which he gives the curious name of Demogorgon might receive in our modern jargon the name - hardly more significant - of the Unconscious." Demogorgon is "the unknown force within the soul that, after extreme conflict and utter surrender of the conscious will, by virtue of the imaginative, creative element drawn down into the depths, can arise and shake the whole accustomed attitude of a man, changing its established tensions and oppressions. Jupiter, within the myth, is felt as such a tension, a tyranny established in the far past by the spirit of a man upon himself and his world, a tyranny that, till it can be overthrown, holds him straightened and tormented, disunited from his own creative energies." pp. 255-256

"This god is indeed akin to Reason and Conscience. He is a power maintaining values once recognized but now outworn, inimical to the needs of the developing mind. Such a god is plainly related to that function, or form of tension to which Freud has given the name of Super-ego." p. 256 f269

286

Abercrombie

Apocalyptic vision "obscure disturbances in the depths of being... charged with importance... Just so works the mind of a poet when a mass of profoundly obscure disturbance is presented to his mind in the figure of a personality unaccountably and vividly alive, yet charged with symbolic significance; such a personality, for example, as the Prometheus of Aeschylus." Prometheus and Satan are "asserting his will against his destiny which is the power of God". pp. 204-206

Structure
Background

Aeschylus
"I have presumed to employ a similar license. The "Prometheus Unbound" of Æschylus supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis. Thetis, according to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus, by the permission of Jupiter, delivered from his captivity by Hercules. Had I framed my story on this model, I should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost drama of Æschylus; an ambition which, if my preference to this mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparison such an attempt would challenge might well abate. But, in truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary."

Prometheus as Satanic hero
"The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends."