For iron's clanging note
Piercing our caves' recesses rang,
And bashful shyness from me smote;—
Forthwith on winged car, unshod, aloft I sprang.
Prometheus.
Alas! alas! Woe! woe!
Prolific Tethys' offspring, progeny 140
Of sire Oceanos, whose sleepless flow
All the wide earth encircles! gaze and see
Bound with what fetters, ignominiously,
I, on the summit of this rock-bound steep,
Shall watch unenvied keep.
Chorus. Antistrophe I.
I see, Prometheus, and through fear
Doth mist of many tears mine eyes bedew,
As, 'gainst this rock, parched up, in tortures drear
Of adamantine bonds, thy form I view. 150
For helmsmen new of sway
Olympos hold; by laws new-made
Zeus wieldeth empire, impulse-swayed;
The mighty ones of old he sweeps away.
Prometheus.
Neath earth, 'neath Hades' shade-receiving plains,
Sheer down to Tartaros' unmeasured gloom
Would he had hurled me ruthless, bound with chains
That none may loose;—So then at this my doom 160
Had no one mock'd,—nor god, nor other kind.
But now most wretched, sport of every wind,
Foes triumph o'er my pains.
