The peculiarities of english romanticism: two trends progressive and regressive. The poets of the "lake school" w wordsworth as. Coleridge, rd. Southey

2.2 Stylistic analysis of Shelly’s works “Adonais”
Finally, in the third stanza, the paradoxical relation between Prometheus’ punishment and its cause is ironically remarked again: “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind” and at the same time his labour and greatness (“thine impenetrable Spirit”) is thanked and recompensed as it was to the benefit of man, whose inherent pain and fatal destiny is highly stressed in this particular strophe from a very pessimistic point of view: “His own funereal destiny / his wretchedness, and his resistance / And his sad unallied existence”.
Prometheus serves as a model for man to bear pain and suffering with “a firm will, and a deep sense”, to overcome the misfortune of mortality with a strong Spirit characteristic of immortality (20, 124).
Byron draws an admirable and idealized character, punished due to a generous and benevolent “crime”, victim of the tyranny of a God and condemned to suffer an eternal torture in complete loneliness. However, as it has been said at the beginning, he was not the only one who made this representation of Prometheus. Defeated but unsubmissive, the Titans (and Prometheus in particular) were popular in the nineteenth century as symbols of revolution or resistance to tyranny.
Now we are going to place the poem in relation with all the poetical production of Byron as a whole, which is the final aim of that paper. The presence of a heroic character in Byron’s work seems to be a constant and characterising feature. The sum of the almost autobiographical character in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, the protagonists of his famous Oriental Tales (The Giaour, The Corsair, etc.) and others like Manfred, Mazeppa, etc., have contributed to configure what we know as the “Byronic hero”, that has been described as “embodying the ultimate in individualism, self-sufficiency, ambition, and aspiration, yet isolated, gloomy, unsatisfied, and dangerous to himself and others”.
Still, Prometheus does not seem to perfectly fit this description, because, as we may have perceived when analysing the poem, Prometheus is much more idealised and lacks that “carnal” aspect that completes the figure of the Byronic hero, who combines the grandness and ambition of his spirit with a sinful and “vicious” corporeal life.
Nonetheless, since Byron’s first successful work, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, we can observe his melancholic feelings towards the Ancient Greek, from where he is reclaiming the hero he’s trying to find. “In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”—and throughout his entire career—Byron is looking for a hero”.
Prometheus’ revolutionary spirit matches also with that of Napoleon Bonaparte, and in Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte” (1814), a very symbolic and revealing comparison is made:
"Or, like the thief of fire from heaven / Wilt thou withstand the shock? / And share with him- the unforgiven / His vulture and his rock?".
“Prometheus' suffering can be likened to Napoleon Bonaparte who has to experience suffering and death first before the society realized his fight for freedom of all people” (18, 146).
Also we can find the same pessimistic and apocalyptic view of man’s “funereal” destiny in Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816).
“All earth was but one thought--and that was death / Immediate and inglorious; and the pang / Of famine fed upon all entrails—men / Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh” (22,45).
The importance of Prometheus’ myth during the Romantic age can be hardly compared with any other time’s. Prometheus gave the romantics an example of courage and rebelliousness against Zeus, who they saw as personification of tyranny. He was the spirit of the French Revolution and of the divinely inspired artist, and “Prometheus” is one of the best examples of this.