The Fate of Prometheus

The Fate of Prometheus

“Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever! / No change, no pause, no hope! – Yet I endure” (I, 23-24) – such are the words of Prometheus, when in desperation and overwhelmed by emotion, his thoughts dissolve in sheer agony and turn to himself, away from the Mighty God whose “ill tyranny” has nailed him to the “eagle-baffling mountain” (I, 19-20). In his essay, Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary, Northrop Frye observes that “pain is the condition which keeps Prometheus conscious” (96), because in reflection, he is confronted with himself, and his sense of self and being. But he is quick to call once again on the “cruel King” (I, 50), who has sentenced him to his fate, after begging the natural world to hear his cries and not punish him, no longer to injure his bones by “burning cold” (I, 33) the chains that bind him or let “Heaven’s winged hound” (I, 33) feed upon him. His words echo his earlier sentiment, found in Aeschylus’ work, where he mourns himself, as a “spectacle of pity” (14) who must suffer the “disease of tyranny (13) . In his quest and the earlier part of his imprisonment, Prometheus still longed to engage and relate to the Olympian, as “a counterpart of himself” (Frye 96), as one god contesting with another for power over and influence on the world. This struggle resulted in the imprisonment of Prometheus, because he craved to incite a revolution, where he desired not to transform the degenerate system of Jupiter but overturn it. Frye reminds us that “Jupiter’s real impetus is toward chaos rather than order” (96), as understood through the initial conversation between Prometheus and the Earth, where he identifies her as a “living spirit” (I, 139) but she is fearful of that description...

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...wer-hungry and egotistical spirit-self within him, which had fastened him to the rock, the altar on which the Priest-King Jupiter had punished him without relief with the power given him. In freeing his true self, Prometheus recognizes the eternal truth that his being was never bound.

Works Cited

Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. 7 Famous Greek Plays. Ed. Whitney J, Oates and Eugene O’Neill Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1950. 5-42.

Frye, Northrop. Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968. 87-124.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Sickness Unto Death. A Kierkegaard Anthology. Ed. Robert Bretall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. 339-371.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2002. 206-283.