Byron on Man Being in Part Divine

Lord Byron · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages carrying Byron's poem Prometheus complete in its three numbered sections, with the lines numbered in tens down the margin. The opening page shows Thomas Phillips's portrait of Byron in Albanian dress.

The first section addresses the Titan whose immortal eyes saw the sufferings of mortality in their sad reality and did not despise them, and asks what his pity earned him — answering with the rock, the vulture and the chain, and with a silent, intense suffering which speaks only in its loneliness and will not even sigh until its voice is echoless. The second sets the strife between suffering and will against the inexorable heaven and the deaf tyranny of Fate, the ruling principle of Hate which creates things for the pleasure of annihilating them, and which refused Prometheus even the boon of dying. The exchange with his tormentor is one of the strongest passages: all that the Thunderer wrung from him was a menace flung back on Zeus, so that in his silence was the sentence and in the god's own hand the lightnings trembled. The third section names his godlike crime as being kind — lessening the sum of human wretchedness and strengthening man with his own mind — and turns him into the lesson the poem exists for. Prometheus is called a symbol and a sign to mortals of their fate and force, and the line that gives the file its title follows directly: like him, man is in part divine, a troubled stream from a pure source. Man too can in part foresee his own funereal destiny and his sad unallied existence, and can set against it a firm will and a deep sense which even in torture can find its own concentred recompense.

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