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Home  »  library  »  poem  »  Prometheus

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Prometheus

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)

Translation of John Sullivan Dwight

BLACKEN thy heavens, Jove,

With thunder-clouds,

And exercise thee, like a boy

Who thistles crops,

With smiting oaks and mountain-tops:

Yet must leave me standing

My own firm earth;

Must leave my cottage, which thou didst not build,

And my warm hearth,

Whose cheerful glow

Thou enviest me.

I know naught more pitiful

Under the sun, than you, gods!

Ye nourish scantily

With altar taxes

And with cold lip-service,

This your majesty;—

Would perish, were not

Children and beggars

Credulous fools.

When I was a child,

And knew not whence or whither,

I would turn my ’wildered eye

To the sun, as if up yonder were

An ear to hear to my complaining—

A heart, like mine,

On the oppressed to feel compassion.

Who helped me

When I braved the Titans’ insolence?

Who rescued me from death,

From slavery?

Hast thou not all thyself accomplished,

Holy-glowing heart?

And, glowing, young, and good,

Most ignorantly thanked

The slumberer above there?

I honor thee! For what?

Hast thou the miseries lightened

Of the down-trodden?

Hast thou the tears ever banished

From the afflicted?

Have I not to manhood been molded

By omnipotent Time,

And by Fate everlasting,

My lords and thine?

Dreamedst thou ever

I should grow weary of living,

And fly to the desert,

Since not all our

Pretty dream buds ripen?

Here sit I, fashion men

In mine own image,—

A race to be like me,

To weep and to suffer,

To be happy and enjoy themselves,

To be careless of thee too,

As I!