Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound (1963)

Abstract

Harold Bloom writes of the passages describing the chariot of the moon and the sphere of the earth in the fourth act, ‘These visions are the mythic culminations of Prometheus Unbound.’¹ Not all commentators would agree, but most have found these passages worthy of comment, Locock remarking that ‘the blank verse marks the highest level attained by Shelley’.² The biblical and Miltonic sources and analogues of these passages have been studied by Wiltrude L. Smith³ and Ants Oras,⁴ the nature of the imagery by R. H. Fogle,⁵ while perhaps the best pages yet written on the thematic significance of these two visions remain those of G. Wilson Knight in The Starlit Dome,⁶ who reads these extraordinary lines (180–318) against the background of the unfolding vision of the total poem. Without such sense of Prometheus as a whole, these passages, however brilliant and portentous in themselves, tend to appear more exotic than they are. And, while the examination of Ezekiel and Milton throws some light on how these passages came to be written, the fact remains that the tone of these visions differs widely from biblical prophecy and the vengeful deity of Milton’s chariot. Nothing in Shelley is more characteristic than these visions, and nothing in Shelley brings to better focus the particular and unusual strategies by which he created poems. These two visions in the celebrations of the fourth Act of the drama are best read in relation to the poem as a whole and in relation to Shelley’s characteristic poetic method.

Shelley readers need not have been surprised by the revelation that the anthology-favourite, ‘Music, when soft voices die’, was addressed not to a woman but to poetry. For, like so much in Coleridge, Shelley’s poetry centres about the value and significance of the imagination. The poet was the representative of this, and poetry stood for the whole order of art. To Shelley, directly concerned with the necessity of the imagination being present in an increasingly materialist society, it was inevitable that he should write about the role and meaning of poetry. This is as much the theme of Prometheus Unbound as it is of Adonais. But this concern expanded into the form of the poems themselves, for so often they are about their own development; the poem, in its development towards the last line or the climaxes, articulates through style and shape the very theme being expressed in the words. This notion of the self-conscious poem may seem a very recent one, but it certainly lies behind that organisation and language which seem so peculiarly typical of Shelley.