The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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Q How does Byron characterize

Prometheus in this poem?

Q What aspects of the Byronic hero

are configured in Prometheus?

READING 28.3

CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero 35

35

And Man in portions can foresee

His own funereal destiny, 50

His wretchedness, and his resistance,

And his sad unallied existence:

To w hich his Spirit may oppose

Itself—and equal to all woes,

And a firm will, and a deep sense, 55

Which even in torture can descry

Its own concenter’d recompense,^3

Triumphant where it dares defy,

And making Death a Victory.

Pushkin: The Byron of Russia

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 was one of the most

dramatic events in nineteenth-century history. Sorely

outnumbered by the Grand Army of Napoleon, Russian

troops resorted to a “scorched earth” policy that produced

severe shortages of food for French and Russians alike. As

French forces advanced on Moscow, leaving a trail of

bloody battles, the Russians burned their own capital city.

Napoleon ultimately captured Moscow, but within a few

months he and his badly diminished army retreated from

Russia, never to return. Deeply moved by Napoleon’s

role in stirring Russian nationalism, Alexander Pushkin

(1799–1837)—Russia’s leading lyric poet and dramatist—

eulogized the hero who, as he explains in the poem

“Napoleon,” had “launched the Russian nation/Upon its

lofty destinies.”

Pushkin, whose maternal great-grandfather was a black

African general, came from an old aristocratic family.

Nevertheless, he claimed comradery with Russia’s humble

commoners. He boasted “I am a versewright and a book-

man,... /No financier, no titled footman,/A commoner:

great on his own.” Like Byron, Pushkin championed polit-

ical freedom; he defended liberal causes, which resulted in

his banishment to south Russia and ultimately to his dis-

missal from the foreign service. His agonizing death, at the

age of thirty-seven, was the result of wounds suffered in a

duel with his wife’s alleged lover.

Pushkin’s Romantic tragedies and long narrative poems

reveal his great admiration for Shakespeare and Byron, and

earned him a reputation as “the Byron of Russia.” Some of

Pushkin’s works, such as Boris Godunov(1825) and Eugene

Onegin(1833)—modeled in part on Byron’s Don Juan—

would inspire operas by composers Modest Mussorgsky

(1839–1881) and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (see chapter 29)

respectively. The lyric poem “Napoleon,” part of which fol-

lows, conveys Pushkin’s gift for buoyant, energetic language

and his profound respect for the figure whom he viewed as

both oppressor and liberator.

(^3) Catch a glimpse of the Spirit’s own sufficient reward.
(^1) Byron replaces the mythological eagle with a vulture.
(^2) Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks.
us. Byron’s voice sets defiance and hope against melan-
choly and despair.

Byron’s “Prometheus”(1816)

Titan! to whose immortal eyes 1

The sufferings of mortality,

Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;

What was thy pity’s recompense? 5

A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture,^1 and the chain,

All that the proud can feel of pain,

The agony they do not show,

The suffocating sense of woe, 10

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.

Titan! to thee the strife was given 15

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, 20

Which for its pleasure doth create

The things it may annihilate,

Refused thee even the boon to die:

The wretched gift eternity

Was thine—and thou hast borne it well. 25

All that the Thunderer^2 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; 30

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, 35

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, 40

In the endurance, and repulse

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit:

Thou art symbol and a sign 45

To Mortals of their fate and force;

Like thee, Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source;