GOETHE'S PROMETHEUS

This essay provides a commentary on an essential poem by Goethe. First the poem, followed by a translation into English:


PROMETHEUS

Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus,
Mit Wolkendunst
Und übe, dem Knaben gleich,
Der Disteln köpft,
An Eichen dich und Bergeshöhn;
Musst mir meine Erde
Doch lassen stehn
Und meine Hütte, die du nicht gebaut,
Und meinen Herd,
Um dessen Glut
Du mich beneidest.

Ich kenne nichts Ärmeres
Unter der Sonn als euch, Götter!
Ihr nähret kümmerlich
Von Opfersteuern
Und Gebetshauch
Eure Majestät
Und darbtet, wären
Nicht Kinder und Bettler
Hoffnungsvolle Toren.

Da ich ein Kind war,
Nicht wusste, wo aus noch ein,
Kehrt ich mein verirrtes Auge
Zur Sonne, als wenn drüber wär
Ein Ohr, zu hören meine Klage,
Ein Herz wie meins,
Sich des Bedrängten zu erbarmen.

Wer half mir
Wider der Titanen Übermut?
Wer rettete vom Tode mich,
Von Sklaverei?
Hast du nicht alles selbst vollendet,
Heilig glühend Herz?
Und glühtest jung und gut,
Betrogen, Rettungsdank
Dem Schlafenden da droben?

Ich dich ehren? Wofür?
Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert
Je des Beladenen?
Hast du die Tränen gestillet
Je des Geängsteten?
Hat nicht mich zum Manne geschmiedet
Die allmächtige Zeit
Und das ewige Schicksal,
Meine Herrn und deine?

Wähntest du etwa,
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehen,
Weil nicht alle
Blütenträume reiften?

Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich!

                      --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


PROMETHEUS

Conceal your heaven in mist, Zeus,
and practice on oaks and mountaintops
like a little boy who beheads thistles;
my earth, however, you must leave intact,
along with my hut which you didn't build,
and my hearth, the flame of which
provokes your envy.

I know nothing more destitute
under the sun than you gods!
Your majesty wretchedly gets by
with offerings and the breaths of prayer;
you would starve to death
if beggars and children
weren't hopeful fools. 

When I was an ignorant child,
my mistaken eyes turned
to the sun, as if there were
an ear up there to witness
my lament, or a heart like mine
to pity those in distress.

Who helped me when I opposed
the rashness of the Titans?
Who saved me from death and slavery?
Wasn't it you, my holy, fiery heart,
who accomplished it all by yourself?
And once, young and decent, didn't you radiate
thanks of deliverance 
toward Him who sleeps above?

Why should I honor you?
Have you ever 
eased the pain of the troubled?
Have you ever 
stilled the tears of the anguished?
Haven't eternal destiny
--your master and mine--
and all-powerful time
forged the man I've become?

Do you really believe
that I should detest life
and flee to the wilderness
just because many dreams 
bloom and don't survive?

I'm seated here, form human beings
according to my image,
a race that will follow my lead,
to suffer, to cry,
to enjoy, to rejoice,
and to ignore you completely,
just like me.

                 --Translated by Thomas Dorsett

A recording of the poem:

1.

This poem has lost nothing of its raw intensity after nearly two hundred and fifty years.  Its modernity, in regard to both content and composition, is striking. With just  a few changes, it could have been written today. 

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire
can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."  Those for whom poetry is much more than entertainment know exactly what Emily Dickinson meant.  They will also know that Goethe's Prometheus contains that paradoxical fire that takes one beyond the ambient temperature of normal existence into a realm of transcendent chill.

The poem, written between 1772-1774--Goethe would have been about twenty-three years old at the time--was first published anonymously in 1785; in 1789 it appeared with acknowledged authorship.  One can understand Goethe's hesitation to publish such an inflammatory poem until he had become an established author.  The period in German literature of which this poem is an outstanding example is called Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress, which flourished from about 1760 to about 1780.  I like to think of that period as "the other sixties movement," which antedates the more famous epoch which roiled Germany two  hundred years later.  The Storm and Stress movement was much calmer and much less violent, but was quite revolutionary in its way.  Rigid morality, conventional religion and all forms of stuffiness had become shadows to be dispersed by the light of a passionate sun.  The expression of emotional intensity is a hallmark of the movement. Its authors attempted to hurtle figurative arrows at the very center of existence.  As one might suspect, not all archers were equal; most arrows fell ridiculously short of their aesthetic and rebellious goals.  Most examples of the Sturm und Drang movement are deservedly forgotten.  Goethe's Prometheus is an astounding exception.

(Goethe's rebelliousness, however, did not last long.  Within a decade of the poem's composition, he had become an official at the Weimar court, where he served--certainly with distinction--until his death at the age of 83.  One could well imagine that the author of Prometheus, a few years after he wrote it, would have become an ardent supporter of the French Revolution.  Nothing could be further from the truth; Goethe detested the turmoil in France.  As those from the second Sixties movement would have said , Goethe had become part of the Establishment--still a literary genius, no doubt, as his later works attest, but now a much more conservative and conventional one.) 

The modernity and freshness of this poem is due not only due to its content but also to its form. It is written in what we today call free verse.  We often think of Walt Whitman, who wrote a century after Goethe, as the father of free verse.  There is some justification for this, since Goethe's Prometheus is sui generis in the author's canon.  Nearly all of Goethe's poetry strictly follows the conventions of meter and rhyme.  German poetry, from Goethe's time to to the end of the Second World War--Hölderlin was a glorious exception--was usually rhymed and had regular meter.  The overwhelmingly favorite form was stanzas of four lines in which the last syllable of line two fully rhymed with the last syllable of line four.  Enjambements were rare.  Geniuses such as Heine and Rilke produced great poetry following these conventions; in the hands of the less gifted, countless excruciatingly boring poems arose to the delight of those whose Poetry I.Q. lay in the limited range. The trauma of the Great War provided a serious blow to this tradition (Trakl); its death was accomplished by the far worse trauma of the Second World War (Celan).

Goethe suspended this tradition for his poem for similar reasons--I am certain that he sensed that the subject matter could not be contained within the bounds of meter and rhyme.  Prometheus gives the mistaken impression that its author simply gushed out his emotions onto paper at one sitting.  This is deceptive.  Although the meter is free, giving the poem a spontaneous feel, Goethe undoubtedly painstakingly went over every word of the composition after he wrote it--It is unknown how long it took him to write the poem; it is known, however, that drafts existed before the final version was published.  A poem that was labored over yet appears spontaneous gives all the more credit to its author.

2.

In the well-known Greek myth, Prometheus, a Titan, defies Zeus by giving the gift of fire to mankind, something which the king of the gods explicitly forbade.  Zeus, unable to retract the gift, punishes Prometheus with eternal torment.  Prometheus was hereafter celebrated as a great friend and benefactor of humanity.

In Goethe's poem, Prometheus accuses Zeus of envying him, and by extension, mankind, because of the flames now present in everyone's hearth.  I think Goethe might be also referring to the flame of genius here--the poem is very much about the glory of self-reliant extraordinary individuals.  In this case, it makes sense for Zeus, who owes his very existence to religious imagination, to be envious.  The myth, however, tells a different story, which reveals an aspect of the poem that isn't modern at all.

Ancient religions--The Greek and Hindu ones being prime examples--are replete with tales of human beings punished for claiming divinity for themselves.  Niobe claimed that her children rivaled Apollo and Diana; Icarus flew too close to the sun; Hindu sages obtained supernatural powers by doing penance.  All these attempts end in disaster.  The Greeks called the loss of balance that results when mortals pretend to be immortal hubris.  We are well aware of the ambiguities of genius and progress; Goethe wasn't.  The Eighteenth Century was quite optimistic and placed great faith in progress.  In Kant's words: "The Enlightenment is mankind's departure from its self-caused immaturity."  Over a century later, a German kaiser told his people, "I am leading you to times of gold."  We know how that turned out.

Goethe's poem, as a true child of the Sturm and Drang era, did indeed believe that geniuses would lead mankind to a golden era.  In one version of the myth, Prometheus created human beings out of clay.  There is a clear reference to this in the last stanza of the poem but with a twist.  The real target of the poem is, of course, the Christian God, and not Zeus.  God created man according to His image, according to Genesis.  Now that God has been replaced by reason, geniuses, a prototype of which is Prometheus, create ordinary human beings  in their image.  Their insights, according to Eighteenth Century optimists,  would inevitably trickle down and usher in a new age of wisdom and peace.  Just like trickle-down economics; we know how that has turned out, too.

Fire enabled mortals to live like the gods.  It is not inappropriate to interpret this fire in the broadest sense,  as also including the fire of technology,which has brought us closer to the gods than the likes of Zeus, Prometheus--and Goethe--could have imagined.  The problem, as we moderns know, is that the evolution of the human brain lags far behind the evolution of technology.  Our primitive urges, out of balance, can't handle technology very well.  It is certainly a basic good.  Think of the fire of genius that has given us the Internet and satellites; think of the fire of genius that has cured so many diseases and helps treat so many others.  The dawn of the space age --the list goes on and on.  It also includes, unfortunately, the enormous fire over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The image of a terrorist entering a city with a nuclear bomb in his briefcase gives us nightmares. Greed writ large by technology has also resulted in the tremendous threat of climate change; it is also causing unprecedented extinctions of animals, each a glorious triumph of evolution.  That list goes on and on, too.

I doubt if Goethe could have written the same poem had he become aware of the genocide committed by many of his countrymen, with great modern efficiency,  less than two centuries after his death.  Since Goethe's time, we have become all too painfully aware of the ambiguities of having a "fiery, glowing heart." Unless the hearts of the overwhelming majority of  people are in the right place, wrong things, very wrong things, can happen. We who live in the twenty-first century, know this all too well.   Regarding the indifference of the gods, however, Goethe would not have to change a word to resonate with many contemporary readers.

3,

A prominent theme of the poem is that belief in a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and concerned with human affairs is no longer tenable.  Prometheus refers to God as the One asleep above.  There is also a direct allusion to the Christian God: the German, "Da ich ein Kind war," ("When I was a child,") is a clear reference to a famous section of Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, namely 
1 Corinthians 13:11.  Now that Prometheus's power of reason has woken him up, he can no longer believe in pious fiction.

In Goethe's day, the philosophy of deism was widespread.  It asserted that although God created the world, he has since, well, disappeared.  Science in Goethe's day, unlike science today, couldn't imagine creation without a divine origin; reason then and now, however,  denies any supernatural involvement in the alleviation of suffering.  Is Goethe indicating merely the withdrawal  of God from the world or is he indicating God's non-existence?  That is open to debate; practically, however, there is little difference between the two positions.

The poem's secularism and its anger concerning the indifference of nature to suffering is largely responsible for its contemporary poignancy.  Most important of all, as with all great poems, is the perfect fusion of content and technical mastery that makes this poem so memorable. It remains, and, in my opinion,  will always remain,  a masterpiece.



Footnote: I feel compelled to add a personal note here.  I do not believe that the literal belief in a supernatural deity is necessary for religion.  An old friend of mine said it best, "Zion ground down must become marrow."  God--you can also use an impersonal term, such as Nirvana, if you're so inclined--resides within.