OF Prometheus, how undaunted | |
| On Olympus’ shining bastions | |
| His audacious foot he planted, | |
| Myths are told and songs are chanted, | |
| Full of promptings and suggestions. | 5 |
| |
| Beautiful is the tradition | |
| Of that flight through heavenly portals, | |
| The old classic superstition | |
| Of the theft and the transmission | |
| Of the fire of the Immortals! | 10 |
| |
| First the deed of noble daring, | |
| Born of heavenward aspiration, | |
| Then the fire with mortals sharing, | |
| Then the vulture,—the despairing | |
| Cry of pain on crags Caucasian. | 15 |
| |
| All is but a symbol painted | |
| Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer; | |
| Only those are crowned and sainted | |
| Who with grief have been acquainted, | |
| Making nations nobler, freer. | 20 |
| |
| In their feverish exultations, | |
| In their triumph and their yearning, | |
| In their passionate pulsations, | |
| In their words among the nations, | |
| The Promethean fire is burning. | 25 |
| |
| Shall it, then, be unavailing, | |
| All this toil for human culture? | |
| Through the cloud-rack, dark and trailing, | |
| Must they see above them sailing | |
| O’er life’s barren crags the vulture? | 30 |
| |
| Such a fate as this was Dante’s, | |
| By defeat and exile maddened; | |
| Thus were Milton and Cervantes, | |
| Nature’s priests and Corybantes, | |
| By affliction touched and saddened. | 35 |
| |
| But the glories so transcendent | |
| That around their memories cluster, | |
| And, on all their steps attendant, | |
| Make their darkened lives resplendent | |
| With such gleams of inward lustre! | 40 |
| |
| All the melodies mysterious, | |
| Through the dreary darkness chanted; | |
| Thoughts in attitudes imperious, | |
| Voices soft, and deep, and serious, | |
| Words that whispered, songs that haunted! | 45 |
| |
| All the soul in rapt suspension, | |
| All the quivering, palpitating | |
| Chords of life in utmost tension, | |
| With the fervor of invention, | |
| With the rapture of creating! | 50 |
| |
| Ah, Prometheus! heaven-scaling! | |
| In such hours of exultation | |
| Even the faintest heart, unquailing, | |
| Might behold the vulture sailing | |
| Round the cloudy crags Caucasian! | 55 |
| |
| Though to all there be not given | |
| Strength for such sublime endeavor, | |
| Thus to scale the walls of heaven, | |
| And to leaven with fiery leaven, | |
| All the hearts of men forever; | 60 |
| |
| Yet all bards, whose hearts unblighted | |
| Honor and believe the presage, | |
| Hold aloft their torches lighted, | |
| Gleaming through the realms benighted, | |
| As they onward bear the message! | 65 |
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