PROMETHEAN FANCIES.
Reading edition
I.
When on to shuddering Caucasus God pours The phials of his anger hoarded long, Plunging in each abyss his fiery prong As if to find a Titan; when loud roars The imprisoned thunder groping for the doors Of never-ending gorges; when, among The desperate pines, Storm howls his battle-song— Then wakes Prometheus, and his voice upsoars. Yea, when the midnight tempest hurries past, There sounds within its wail a wilder wail Than that which tells the anguish of the blast; And when the thunder thunders down the gale, A laugh within its laugh tells woe so vast That God’s own angels in the darkness quail.
II.
Prometheus—none may see him. But at night When heaven’s bolt has made some forest flare On Caucasus, and when the broad red glare Rushing from crag to crag at infinite height Stains sleeping wastes of snow, or, ruby bright, Runs sparkling up the glacier crests to scare The screaming eagles out of black chasms, where But half dislodged the darkness still clings tight— Then on some lurid monstrous wall of rock The Titan’s shadow suddenly appears Gigantic, flickering, vague; and, storm-unfurled, Seems still to brave, with hand that dim chains lock, Midway in the unendingness of years, The Author of the miscreated world.
THE END. Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row, London.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
THE NEW MEDUSA, AND OTHER POEMS. 8s.
“We should have to go to great names among contemporary poets before we found a volume of verse with a message so clear and so touching.... There is in the lines quoted a directness of speech due partly to the situation of the writer and partly to the rare gift which, above all others, makes a man a poet—a gift of truthful and sincere utterance. We have quoted from the more personal parts of the book because we have been greatly touched by them. But it is on the dramatic power displayed in such poems as ‘The Raft’ that the writer’s position will have to rest.”—Athenæum.
“The power which every capable reader of Mr. Lee-Hamilton’s previous work, must have recognised is still more apparent in the New Medusa.... The imaginative power which reproduces and dramatises a certain mood of mind is very noteworthy. It is in this faculty of what may be called psychography, of drawing the landscape of moods with atmosphere and environment suitable and complete, that Mr. Lee-Hamilton’s poetic power chiefly consists.”—Academy.