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Written for Romantic Poets English 346, Professor Darlington In Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, sound plays a crucial role in shaping the action of the play, developing the characters, and conveying a plausible sense of progression from the frozen landscape of Prometheus in chains to a cosmos of unified love. The play moves from discord to synchronization as the lost and scattered voices of the elements intermingle to find their own niches within the music of the universe. Shelley often uses refrains to establish the themes of specific passages as if they were symphonic movements. He also fashions his stanzas in rhythmic patterns meant to convey a specific mood, weaving his dialogue into an intricate song more rich and powerful than mere dramatic interchange. These musical devices serve as the impetus for the play's development, creating the momentum for the changes occurring within the characters and throughout the external realm. Voices also figure prominently in the action as they curse, guide, persuade, echo one another, and ultimately shape the reality of the entire universe. Shelley establishes the tone of Act 1 with the repetition of Prometheus' line, "Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever"(Reiman & Powers I.I.23). The rolling motion of this phrase suggests the momentum of fate; the inexorable slope into despair down which Prometheus and the world around him have fallen. Like the ocean's waves, the line has the power to lull, to render Prometheus helpless against the course of destiny. The repetition later on of the words "Fallen and Vanquished"(R&P I.I.313) reinforces the titan's sense of powerlessness. The elements themselves echo his assertion of doom, voiceless in themselves yet crying out "Misery"(R&P I.I.108) in reaction to his lamentations. The physical world also shouts back Prometheus' curse, refracting it into shards of hatred and anger. His words rip through the four elements, wounding the air until it grows dark with blood, rumbling through the mountains, and causing havoc on the seas. Prometheus' curse holds the power to create a stasis of hatred, turning the atmosphere around him into an icy ravine as it banishes the fiery whirlwinds to cold and silence, "Though silence is as hell to us"(R&P I.I.106). He forms an atmosphere of unnatural stagnation with his speech alone. One gets the impression at the start of the play that he has literally not spoken in ages. The vibrations of his curse shake the timbre of the external universe to its very core and cause reverberations of passion that re-scend upon him and keep him enslaved to the rock and, internally, his own hatred. Awakening from what seem to be aeons of blind misery, Prometheus needs to hear his curse again to release its hold upon him. When he asks the elements to repeat his words, however, he hears echoes of agony all around him as if the original yell had shattered into a myriad of particles like a prism scattering light into countless streams of color. He does not recognize his original thought, distorted as it is by time and its impression upon the objects reflecting it back at him. It has undergone modulations akin to a symphonic phrase played by individual instruments; the thump of the bass and the violin's legato impose dramatically different characteristics upon the same melody line. Only when about to invoke the shade of Jupiter does Prometheus hear a faint reverberation of his curse in its undiluted power. "...what an awful whisper rises up!/ 'Tis scarce like sound, it tingles through the frame/ As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike"(R&P I.I.132-134). This is his curse in the language of the dead, transformed from individual words to pure force threatening to tear the fabric of the universe itself. As naked sound, his curse sheds its individuality and becomes an archetypal power coursing through the earth. However, the lightning imagery also holds a connotation of hope as it promises to blast the freezing paralysis of Prometheus' landscape with a streak of much-needed fire. Prometheus cannot understand the formless language of the dead. However, he feels dim shadows sweeping through his inner ear like a sea. These are the voices of the shades beneath the earth, swelling, subsiding, and so multitudinous that they merge into one stream of sound, leaving him faint as if with passion. This noise, monotonous yet composed of an infinite number of voices, foreshadows the all-encompassing music that later becomes apparent to Prometheus and the elements around him as it harmonizes the universe with love. Here, Prometheus derives from the sound a sense not of love (although he likens it to love), but of unpleasant murkiness. He alone can change the tenor of the voices by dredging up the curse held by the dead and releasing it. Jupiter's shade serves as the catalyst for this act because the curse binds the monarch to his isolated throne as much as it chains Prometheus to his rock. In his essay "Shelley's Prometheus Unbound," M. H. Abrams states that Prometheus has "fallen into disunity and conflict as a consequence of his moral error in having succumbed. . . to the divine passion of hate"(R&P 598). With his curse, Prometheus not only creates dissonance within the elements around him, but also sets the tone for the hateful tyranny that Jupiter holds over the world. His curse virtually demands that Jupiter reign with oppressive force and bring out the worst traits of mankind. His words literally create reality, and as he awakens the physical universe to pain, he activates Jupiter to tyranny. Only by hearing Jupiter repeat his curse and realizing the all-transforming power of the word can he begin to de-activate his curse's awesome energy. Jupiter's reiteration provides a perfect harmonic balance to the drama between him and Prometheus, tearing through the phantasm as "fire tears a thunderbolt"(R&P I.I.255). The mighty thunder of Jupiter's spell rebounds upon him just as the titan's speech boomerangs back to him in full force. Both entities serve as reflections of the other. Shelley creates a musical justice with these double reverberations, putting the past into perspective and allowing the drama to progress. After the roaring fury of the curse, the elements echo the Earth's lament that Prometheus lies fallen and vanquished, but Ione sees the sound as a only a "passing spasm"(R&P I.I.315), which seems a fitting musical touch by Shelley to emphasize the ebbing of the theme of despair. By noting the demise of the titan's agony in this manner, Shelley paves the way for the entrance of Mercury, who symbolizes air and lightness. Although coming to warn Prometheus of Jupiter's wrath, Mercury fans a seed of hope in his implication of the god's imminent fall. This theme blows softly through the rest of the act like a spring breeze and clears the rubble of the curse from the stage, so to speak. Mercury's inherent freshness pervades the act like the lilting melody of a flute. His presence, if not his words, seems to lift the gloom from Prometheus' brow. Prometheus' mind grows serene after the explosive first part of the act, resisting even the furies, who threaten to sit beside his soul "like a vain/ loud multitude"(R&P 484-486). They call for the voices of fear, and compare Prometheus to Christ in the way that their words, so powerful, grow bitter as they echo through time and the train of humanity. These words wound Prometheus like a cloud of winged snakes, symbolizing cursed knowledge. The furies' speech has the power to temporarily cloud the titan's calm center of mind, and he desires to fix the tortured orbs of the cosmos in peace and death. The furies' words remind him that nothing is static, and that everything good must inevitably decay. Prometheus describes the nature of words to fall apart:
As Jupiter and Prometheus balance one another out in the first part of the act, so this revelation on the corruption of noble words offers an exact counterpoint to Prometheus' joy in knowing that his evil words to Jupiter will fade away into oblivion. Shelley shows us here that all speech, regardless of motivation, is essentially fallen. Words are born, they will die, and neither good nor bad will last forever. The key to acceptance lies in the figure of Mercury who, in the very heart of the oppositions of the act, embodies the ability to change and shift with the wind around him. He represents mutability, or the ability to adapt, which will be the redeeming factor for Prometheus and the world around him as they change to accept love. Situated in between the scene with Jupiter and the scene with the furies, Mercury symbolizes the neutral center of the soul, the spot over which words have no power, which Prometheus finds at the end of Act 1. The spirits, meanwhile, illuminate Prometheus as to the nature of sound itself. The first arises from the dust of outworn creeds, or flawed words, to hear only one sound, a voice of love creating all. The fourth spirit elucidates upon the role of the Poet, the being whose job it is to create from the universe forms more real than reality itself, and from the universal sound, words which glorify the source from whence they spring. Shelley echoes this ability in the very last speech of Prometheus Unbound, in which hope creates, "from its own wreck the thing it contemplates"(R&P IV.I.574). The Poet is responsible for assembling a myth of the world to create hope until the myth reaches its own fruition in reality. In his essay "Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound," D.J. Hughes states that "Shelley's poetry seeks the form that will best recover what that form, by actualizing itself, must necessarily lose"(R&P 618). The Poet creates, from a fallen language, an image of that which is not fallen. The spirits imply that Prometheus must adopt this role-- he must not become attached the results of his words as the furies would have him do, but instead must continually create new ones as the old ones die. In his essay about Shelley's mythmaking in Prometheus Unbound, Harold Bloom states that "progression through contraries gives way to a vision of finality in which the unceasing creation of the artist is seen to be a type of individual revelation, of an apocalyptic salvation open to all"(Bloom 93). He asserts that liberation is impossible within the human condition (Bloom 124), yet offers the possibility of transcendence through the ability to continually create. In the first act of the play, Prometheus encounters a variety of contraries; himself versus Jupiter, his curse against Jupiter's chains, the despair and hope inherent in the frailty of the individual voice, and the enlightened Sound versus the words which can serve as agents of salvation. He becomes experienced as to the nature of reality, but can overcome his desolation at its emptiness by, like Mercury, maintaining constant motion. The phrase of "the prophecy which begins and ends in thee"(R&P I.I.690-691), repeated three times in Act 1, illuminates Prometheus' role as creator. He, like Shelley, must become a poet of the times. Once bound, he must now bind. He must transform himself from a victim of time and chaos into an agent of change, one who can help harmonize the discordant elements created in his past into a cohesive whole inseparable from the all-encompassing sound of love. At the end of Act 1, he speaks of the stillness, the quiet of the morning air. After the confusion of voices, the world becomes a blank slate for which he must compose a new, healing music. His newfound understanding and acceptance of his role causes Asia's lair to be "haunted by sweet airs and sounds"(R&P I.I.830), signifying the unfreezing of the voice of love. Moving from cold to warmth and progressing from point to counterpoint to illustrate a larger harmonic reality, Act 1 of Prometheus Unbound reads like an entire symphony on its own. Act II begins with Asia, in her lair, describing how "beatings haunt the desolated heart"(R&P II.I.4). These beatings, like those of a distant drum, represent the faint pulse of love present even in Asia's isolation. She hears the 'aeolian music' of Panthea emerging through the 'printless air,' which has not known sound in ages. With these subtle images, Shelley continues the musical theme established in Act I, showing how Prometheus' awakening sends the spirit of sound across frozen landscapes and stormy seas to arouse his love from her languished state. Panthea flies to Asia wrapped in music, bearing messages of its transforming power. In her first dream, Prometheus' voice "makes giddy the dim brain"(R&P II.I.65-66), seducing her into a trance and then overwhelming her completely, portraying love as an all-dissolving force which enters the consciousness through sound. She and Prometheus become one, and when they separate once more, she hears his voice "Like footsteps of far melody"(R&P II.I.89). The dream demonstrates the power of sound to bind together disparate forces, and depicts as well the reversal of Prometheus' role as victim to that of Creator. The refrain of the second dream, urging the two females to "Follow, follow"(II.I.132), echoes throughout all of Act II. In Panthea's dream, it drives the formerly unwilling wind to shake the 'clinging music' from the pines. This wind represents the driving force of sound as it grows in intensity to awaken all of creation to the unity of the force of love. This wind also hastens the Echoes to Asia, who inform her that "In the world unknown/ Sleeps a voice unspoken;/ By thy step alone/ Can its rest be broken"(R&P II.I.190-193). Flowing to her from Prometheus, the Echoes establish Asia as the sole force who can activate the voice that will bring about the great change for mankind. Prometheus has figuratively passed his baton over to Asia, and the Echoes inspire her to action with a sing-song chant that seems hypnotic in its unvarying rhythm and refrain; the phrase 'Down, down' is repeated ten times in one passage. In his essay "The Role of Asia in the Dramatic Action of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound," Frederick Pottle states that "The eddies of echoes...are actually much more than the mere guide they appear....They are a positive force attracting and impelling her, and they grow steadily stronger as she yields to their impetus; she half walks, half floats on her way, thinking the motion due to her own limbs"(Pottle 135). The music of the Echoes, not their words, create the irresistible pull to which Asia must succumb. As Prometheus' music overwhelms Panthea's spirit, the sound of the Echoes overcomes Asia's defenses, sweeping her to Demogorgon as the spring wind scatters seeds across the land. The forest through which Asia winds her way hums with melody. Birds chirp, the streams are 'music-tongued,' and as she goes deeper and deeper, she hears Silenus' ancient song of "fate and chance and God, and chaos old,/ And love and the chained Titan's woeful doom..."(II.II.91-97). This song teaches her that the story of Prometheus, so sharply tragic in the present, is only a part of a much larger mythical composition. Near the heart of the forest, she reaches a place that gathers energy until "some great truth is loosened, and the nations echo round/ Shaken to their roots"(R&P II.III.40-42). She has entered the physical manifestation of the universal sound, at the center of which sits the great force, personified by Demogorgon, who will unleash the strains necessary to harmonize the world. Pottle describes Demogorgon as "directing the stream of sound"(Pottle 135). In this role, Demogorgon reveals himself as the ideal Shelleyan poet, creating unceasingly. The spirits leading Asia to Demogorgon take her "Through the veil and the bar/ Of things which seem and are"(R&P II.III.59-60), that is, the illusory world of life and death, and lead her to "One Pervading, One alone"(II.III.74). They entrance her into a state beyond the ephemeral world of time and place. With the power of music, they convey her to the very center of creation at which dualities cease to exist, and only love prevails. Their song lulls her into a state of receptiveness which will allow her to become a conduit of this love for the phenomenal world. While in this space where sound is created, Asia learns of the inherent failure of words to capture the source of existence. She talks of how Prometheus gave man speech and in turn thought, "Which is the measure of the Universe"(II.IV.72-73), but Demogorgon shows her that even words crumble in the act of naming the great universal force. In the unity of all things, measure does not exist, an image cannot be formed because such things require the concept of time, which has no meaning for the Absolute. Music and words cannot be where there is no time; only love transcends the barriers of the temporal universe, creating the world like a "harmonious mind/ Pour[ing] itself forth in all-prophetic song"(R&P 75-56). The sound of love is all, and the music of the fallen universe serves the necessary function of guiding its inhabitants to their Source, just as it carries Asia to Demogorgon's throne. Having learned of the universal source, Asia then discovers the purpose of the word. She has merely to ask what will happen to Prometheus, and Demogorgon begins his ascent to overthrow Jupiter. Although but fractured bits of the one great sound, words do hold the ability to shake the existing structures of reality, to crack apart the foundations of the present and create a new reality from the ideas that they convey. When Asia emerges from the depths of Demogorgon's cavern, Panthea exclaims at her radiance, saying that she dares not look upon her, but can feel her presence. Asia has become transparent with love and vibrates with the very universe around her. Panthea asks her if she cannot feel the love of all beings and the caress of the winds, who are enamored of her. The reverberations of the elements create love, and Asia, able to feel them after her purifying journey, realizes that love and the pulse of everything that lives are the same. She compares her soul to a boat "by the instinct of sweet Music driven. . . (to) Realms where the air we breathe is Love/ Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,/ Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above"(R&P II.V.95-97). Her trip to Demogorgon's lair peels away her layers of ignorance, exposing her to the sychronicity of all that exists. After Jupiter's downfall, which balances harmonically with Prometheus' past agony with the echo of the words "ever, forever, down"(III.I.81), Prometheus and Asia unite. They talk of going to a cave with Ione and Panthea with a fountain that leaps with an 'awakening sound,' where the ever-moving air whispers and they will "Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new"(III.I.38). Here they will become Creators, continually fashioning a universe of music and sound. However, they can only commence this creation when the Spirit of the Hour blows into Asia's shell to release the spirit of love. For Asia, the shell holds rich symbolic value, as a shell served as the conduit conveying her from the sea to the air, where she filled the atmosphere with her beauty. This shell serves the same purpose, spreading love through the cosmos with its sound. The shell will awaken humanity with its cathartic blast, which balances with the thunder of the curse in Act I. The two sounds offset one another and provide a sense of harmonic completion. The shell's vibrations cause currents of wind to sweep through the atmosphere casting away the obscuring murk spread by Prometheus' curse. As Demogorgon strips Asia of illusion, the sound of the shell's blast peels the wickedness from the universe and reveals all of creation in its true harmony. Act IV presents the elements joined in one great cosmic song. With the abolition of Time, there can be no clear plot as in Act I. The universe can produce no drama, only a jubilant chorus of sound. It sheds itself of the ignorance "Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes"(III.IV.150), the all-encompassing acceptance of the heart producing no discord that would create the tension necessary for conflict. Here, Shelley's composition takes on the character of a hymn, the voices of the elements aligned in perfect rhythm and love. In contrast with Act I, which features ponderous speeches and words of hate, Act II contains stanzas short, lilting, and melodious. After the weight of the opening scenes, the play grows more musical in character, fairly leaping off the page with the sing-song quality of its verse. "Let the Hours, and the Spirits of might and pleasure/ Like the clouds and sunbeams unite, Unite"(IV.I.78-80) the spirits sing, a random 'Voice' calling out the refrain, 'Unite!' The profusion of voices creates a sense of cosmic harmony as Prometheus begins his task of building a new universe. The words of the elements do not matter so much as their music, for the sound that they create renders them inseparable from one another just like the players in an orchestra, and the theme of individuality becomes meaningless in the grand harmony they come to embody. Song dominates all, and the singers fit within their niches perfectly. Even the Earth rouses herself from her gloom, laughing and bouncing like a jolly widow within the 'animation of delight.' The Earth and all her children grow drunk with sound. When Panthea and Ione see the earth and the moon wheel by in their orbed configurations, they behold a vision of the harmony of the larger universe. Each macrocosm has its own sound-- the moon its silvery tinklings and the earth the 'self-conflicting' pulses of its countless cyclical constructions. Churning with the gyrations of its orbs, the earth sheds warm energy upon the moon's surface and allows it to reflect the love generated by that heat back to its source. As their vibrations synchronize with each other, they create a resonance akin to that of a magnetic field. They become united as they are in divine harmony, joined by the wedding-song of the elements. In his essay, Abrams states that "The thematic word [of the passage] is 'Unite!' and this concept is enacted in the...episode of the wooing and love union between the masculine earth and the feminine moon"(R&P 603). This cosmic bonding symbolizes the coming-together of all the voices of the world as they merge into the universal sound like old lovers running into each others arms. Prometheus emphasizes the inseparability of life in his portrayal of humanity. "Man, oh! not men! a chain of linked thought,/ Of love and might to be divided not"(IV.I.394-395). Bound by the same melody, individuals fade into a chorus of unified minds, "...one harmonious Soul of many a soul/ Whose nature is its own divine control"(R&P 400-401). D.J. Hughes notes that, with the eradication of the singular voice, "the phenomenal, and the logos behind it, collapse; but a creative, saving power above this world has been revealed"(R&P 611). As the earth joins the moon, all of creation rushes into the Creative Sound, every element becoming archetypal as it sheds its temporal marks of identification. In this purified order, love alone rules. Before the play begins, Prometheus shatters this order with his curse, ignorantly supposing his individual voice to be more important than the harmony of the whole. He damns Jupiter not knowing that his suffering fits in with a scheme larger than his own. The unity of all beings is hidden from him, and he veils it even further with his curse, which causes vibrations of hate and anger to emanate from all the elements about him. Thus he forcibly separates himself from Asia, the voice of love. Only at the end of the first Act does he realize his utter powerlessness to the universal cycles; his words will turn sour and the fruits of his good intentions will inevitably decay with time. He, as well as Jupiter, is not exempt from the ebbing and flowing of the universal music. He must succumb to the great force encompassing him; any effort to control the uncontrollable only leads to discord as he breaks himself off from the flow of things, denying the 'yes' of his own heart. This dissonance, however, does fit in with a larger cycle of universal growth, ripening, and decay. Prometheus embodies this cycle with his fall from his mighty state to his period of misery to the heightening of awareness leading him to envision the world in all of its harmony. Although he seems an individual agent of suffering in the first Act, he comes to embody a larger whole as the play progresses, reflecting the order of the universe back onto itself. In his essay "The Psychoanalysis of Fire," Gaston Bachelard links fire with song, theorizing that the gentle rubbing motion of stick on stick creates a rhythm which paves the way for the advent of musical composition(Bachelard 28). This hypothesis resonates with the Promethean myth, as Prometheus bestows upon humanity fire and speech, and then later creates from the resonances of his own gift a vision of universal harmony. The Earth likens language to a "perpetual Orphic song,/ Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng/ Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were"(IV.I.415-417). Prometheus awakens the Earth's inhabitants out of their ignorant slumber with the concept of speech, and when that form decays into near-anarchy, he gathers the discordant sounds of the world into a larger vibration of love. The jubilant song of the elements is not permanent, however; it too will fade into another order of sound. Only the constant hum of the universe transcends the cycles of joy and sorrow which seem mere bubbles in the aether of sound. At the end of Act IV, Demogorgon summons the disparate creations to merge within the universal sound. The Earth, likening herself to "...a drop of dew that dies"(IV.I.522), dies literally into the sound. The elements all submit themselves to this harmony, each losing itself within the larger structure. In the end, Demogorgon addresses Prometheus alone, telling him that he must "...suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;/...forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;/...defy Power which seems Omnipotent;/...love and bear;...Neither...change nor falter nor repent"(IV.I.570-575) in order to be free. Prometheus must endure mythic hardships in order to realize the bliss of pure acceptance. He must take on the burden of the world to come to a heightened understanding of his own vibration therein. His double knowledge of agony and love grants him the power of creation-- having experienced the awful reverberations of his own words yet grown wise to their inherent frailty, he recognizes them as a fallen form of sound and realizes the necessity of aligning the universe with pure unceasing music. He has learned to observe the larger harmonic structure of reality without attaching himself to a single chord as he does when he curses Jupiter and produces a life-denying stasis. He accepts a larger vision of change, viewing it not in terms of his own fluctuations of power, but as the manifestation of cosmic harmony in the temporal world. His destiny impels him to bring divine sound into the world of time, and he realizes his human side by losing himself in that lesser reality. Demogorgon speaks of the necessity of this dark period; as a figure existing in between humanity and the gods, Prometheus must enter the world of limited perception. He becomes a reflection of both divine and human experience; a microcosm of the universe just like the Earth orb with all of its miniature revolving cycles. Only by embodying all of creation can Prometheus become a Creator and echo the voice of love on every possible level of existence. Having experienced all, he carries within him the seeds of limitless potentiality and can, as Demogorgon suggests, serve as a catalyst of "Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory"(IV.I.578). In Prometheus Unbound, the titan evolves from progressions and oppositions into a realm beyond duality, in which he creates all and loses himself in what Hughes calls the "full, self-destroying cosmic music"(R&P 608). Aurally, the play moves from sounds of strife to persuasive melodies to a crescendo of jubilance echoed by the earth and heavens alike. It ends seemingly because the world has redeemed itself of words, refining itself until nothing is left but harmonic reverberation. All individuality fades into the silence of unceasing sound. Prometheus vibrates with the pulse of love, fashioning the universe out of the pure resonance of itself.
Bibliography 1. Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers, Shelley's Poetry and Prose. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977. 2. Harold Bloom, "Prometheus Unbound" from Shelley's Mythmaking. 3. Bachelard, Gaston, "Psychoanalysis and Prehistory: The Novalis Complex" from The Psychoanalysis of Fire. 4. Pottle, Frederick A., "The Role of Asia in the Dramatic Action of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound." 5. Abrams, M.H., "Shelley's Prometheus Unbound" from Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers, Shelley's Poetry and Prose. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977. 6. Hughes, D.J., "Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound" from Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers, Shelley's Poetry and Prose. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977. Articles are copyrighted by their authors. They may not be redistributed in whole or in part without prior written permission. You may make copies for your own private use, but include this copyright notice and proper attribution to the author. |