the inky digit of defiance
But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime, And fatal have her Saturnalia been To Freedom’s cause, in every age and clime; Because the deadly days which we have seen, And vile Ambition, that built up between Man and his hopes an adamantine wall, And the base pageant last upon the scene, Are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall Which nips life’s tree, and dooms man’s worst – his second fall. (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv, xcvii) Both Byron and Shelley call on Prometheus and his commitment to man’s future to help them weather what Shelley calls in his Preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818) ‘the age of despair’ that, for intellectuals like him, followed on from what he had to call, in the lines above, the ‘strife, deceit and fear’ of the French Revolution. What is needed for the creation of a just, independent society after this setback, writes Shelley, is ‘resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage’. Such perseverance and indefatigable hope are symbolically pre-eminent in the apparently hopelessly chained Prometheus. Shelley writes: The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues, and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in France, was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilised world . . . This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. – 254 –