Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/68

50 hope that so he may apprehend. And he does not apprehend; only awful thoughts sweep obscurely through his brain, and he feels faint with vague emotion; and the Earth, still inarticulately, murmurs in despair,

just as afterwards (Act III. sc. iii. v. 110) she says to Asia, who questions her about death:—

Prometheus demands, "And what art thou, O melancholy Voice?" and she answers in a long speech beginning, "I am the Earth, thy mother," and this speech is in her natural living voice, for he clearly comprehends it, replying, "Venerable mother!" and she continues the same voice in a second speech, which also by his reply he clearly comprehends; yet in these two great speeches, uttered in the voice that is heard of the Gods (since the other, vv. 140-1, is distinguished as the voice the Gods hear not), she seems to have quite forgotten her fear of "Heaven's fell King"; extolling Prometheus, bewailing his martyrdom, denouncing with the utmost freedom "our almighty Tyrant," avowing "a mother's hate breathed on her child's destroyer," branding the Gods as the offspring of "all-prolific Evil." By this fearless out-speaking in the very spirit of the Titan's curse, whose subsequent revocation, as already noticed, she vehemently laments, the Earth, to my understanding, sharply contradicts herself, and altogether stultifies the evocation of the