Shelley's Simple Dwelling

Percy Bysshe Shelley · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages giving a passage from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, act III scene iii, set in the Caucasus, with the lines numbered in tens and the cast of the scene listed at the head: Prometheus, Hercules, Ione, the Earth, Asia and Panthea, borne in the car with the Spirit of the Hour.

The speech comes at the moment Hercules unbinds Prometheus, and it is a description of where he intends to live now that he is free. There is a cave overgrown with trailing odorous plants which curtain out the day, paved with veined emerald, a fountain leaping in the middle with an awakening sound, and the mountain's frozen tears hanging from the curved roof like snow or silver or long diamond spires, raining forth a doubtful light. Around it are mossy seats and rough walls clothed with long soft grass, and the ever-moving air is heard whispering outside from tree to tree, with birds and bees. What is asked for is deliberately modest — a simple dwelling, which shall be our own — and what will be done there is talk: sitting and talking of time and change as the world ebbs and flows, themselves unchanged, on the question of what can hide man from mutability. The rest of the speech describes an occupation rather than a rest. They will entangle buds and flowers and beams and make strange combinations out of common things, search with looks and words of love for hidden thoughts each lovelier than the last, and, like lutes touched by the enamoured wind, weave harmonies divine and ever new out of a sweetness of difference where discord cannot be.

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