Or summer’s heat when, ruffled by no rippling breeze,
Ocean slept waveless, on his midday couch laid prone.”
With the first lines of “Prometheus Bound” we are carried far from the haunts of men:—
“Unto this far horizon of earth’s plain we’ve come,
This Scythian tract, this desert by man’s foot untrod.”
Hephæstus reluctant, compelled by Zeus’s order, rivets his kin-god, the Fire-bringer, to the desolate North Sea crag and withdraws leaving Prometheus in fetters to “wrestle down the myriad years of time.” The night shuts off the warmth and light, drawing over him her “star-embroidered robe,” and the fierce sun-god returns with blazing rays to “deflower his fair skin” bared of the white counterpane of “frost of early dawn.” Not until the emissaries of Zeus have departed does Prometheus deign to speak. Then he “communes with Nature.” He has no hope of help from God, none from the “helpless creatures of a day” whom he has helped. Alone with the forces of nature he utters that outcry unsurpassed in sublimity and in pathos:—
“O upper air divine and winds on swift wings borne;
Ye river-springs; innumerous laughter of the waves
Of Ocean; thou, Earth, the mother of us all;
And thou, all-seeing orb of the Sun—to you I cry: