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Lord Byron’s “Prometheus” is one of my favorite poems. Once, in a discussion about poetry, someone asked me why. I impulsively replied: “Because ‘Prometheus’ teaches you about not giving a fuck”.

Needless to say, the discussion became lively and several arguments and counter-arguments followed – all polite and civilized, which is rare these days.

I was asked to explain myself. I did. And I decided to transfer the conclusions from that discussion here.

Byron’s “Prometheus”: the Poem

Lord Byron’s “Prometheus” is a short poem referring to the mythical Titan who stole fire from Zeus to give it to humans. Zeus decided that Prometheus should be bound to a rock and tormented for eternity.

If this rings a bell, it’s because it precedes the fall of Lucifer in Christian mythology (mentioning this just in case you thought Christianity was original in its fairy-tales, in any way).

Parenthetically, if you’re interested in how Romantic poets viewed Lucifer or hell, take a look at William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (also available for free).

When Wisdom and Benevolence Are Punished

Byron’s “Prometheus” begins powerfully:

Titan! to whose immortal eyes 
         The sufferings of mortality, 
         Seen in their sad reality, 
Were not as things that gods despise; 
What was thy pity’s recompense? 
A silent suffering, and intense; 
The rock, the vulture, and the chain, 
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe, 
         Which speaks but in its loneliness, 
And then is jealous lest the sky 
Should have a listener, nor will sigh 
         Until its voice is echoless. 

Byron’s verse clearly depicts the tragic circumstances of Prometheus’s acts and eventual fate. The term “tragic” is not used liberally, but refers to Aristotelian notions of theatrical tradition. Namely, it denotes a hamartia, a “fatal flaw” which bring disproportionate suffering to the hero.

For Prometheus, his benevolence and attempt to spread wisdom – by offering it to humans – is punished severely. The disproportionate nature of the punishment shines in awful beauty in the course of the following lines.

Punishment, Eternity, and the Temporal Nature of Fear

Titan! to thee the strife was given 
         Between the suffering and the will, 
         Which torture where they cannot kill; 
And the inexorable Heaven, 
And the deaf tyranny of Fate, 
The ruling principle of Hate, 
Which for its pleasure doth create 
The things it may annihilate, 
Refus’d thee even the boon to die: 
The wretched gift Eternity 
Was thine—and thou hast borne it well. 
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee 
Was but the menace which flung back 
On him the torments of thy rack; 
The fate thou didst so well foresee, 
But would not to appease him tell; 
And in thy Silence was his Sentence, 
And in his Soul a vain repentance, 
And evil dread so ill dissembled, 
That in his hand the lightnings trembled. 
Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, 
         To render with thy precepts less 
         The sum of human wretchedness, 
And strengthen Man with his own mind; 
But baffled as thou wert from high, 
Still in thy patient energy, 
In the endurance, and repulse
         Of thine impenetrable Spirit, 
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, 
         A mighty lesson we inherit: 

Here it becomes evident that Prometheus’s torment is a temporal one, not unlike Sisyphus’s own inherently absurd situation. “The wretched gift Eternity\ Was thine”. This will soon become important, so let’s waste no time (no pun intended).

“A Mighty Lesson We Inherit”

The lesson is that humans are powerful precisely because they are temporally-bound, finite creatures. We are born and we die, no exceptions. Byron’s “Prometheus” tells us that there is a lot of power in dying and, particularly, in knowing that we will die.

To face one’s mortality is “a mighty lesson”, beyond the grasp of any (hypothetical) god.

Byron’s “Prometheus” offers existential empowerment, or, in layman’s terms, how not giving a fuck (about dying) is an extremely powerful philosophical stance.

This is the continuation and conclusion of the poem:

Thou art a symbol and a sign 
         To Mortals of their fate and force; 
Like thee, Man is in part divine, 
         A troubled stream from a pure source; 
And Man in portions can foresee 
His own funereal destiny; 
His wretchedness, and his resistance, 
And his sad unallied existence: 
To which his Spirit may oppose 
Itself—and equal to all woes, 
         And a firm will, and a deep sense, 
Which even in torture can descry 
         Its own concenter’d recompense, 
Triumphant where it dares defy, 
And making Death a Victory. 

The brilliance of Byron’s poem lies in making explicit everything that two millennia of the Prometheus mythology sometimes only implied. Examples include rebellion against authority – particularly against dogma and religious tyranny – and the disproportionate punishment befalling the enlightened.

But truly, the key to unlocking the poem – and facing our existential fears – lies in the final two lines. “Triumphant where it dares defy,/And making Death a Victory”.

Byron’s “Prometheus” and the Tragedy of the Enlightened

Prometheus becomes a particularly painful example for modern humanity – though, of course, the whole point is that it’s only the understanding that is modern; the pain is timeless.

I’m talking about the suffering befalling the enlightened (and sometimes weaker). Prometheus’s story is timeless because it describes a timeless reality: the strong dominating the weak.

Yet at the same time, it also manages to display the reversed reality latent in this existential pull: Despite the authority’s (“the strong”, “God”, or whatever else you want to call it) domination of the weak – humanity, specifically as well as generally – the so-called weak can counter the injustice in ways that are indefensible by the strong.

Next time someone tells you they believe in an omniscient God, ask them this: If God is omniscient, does He have a subjective experience of death?