IONE: 
O, sister, look!  White fire
Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;
How fearfully God’s thunder howls behind!

MERCURY: 
I must obey his words and thine:  alas! 435
Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart!

PANTHEA: 
See where the child of Heaven, with winged feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.

IONE: 
Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes
Lest thou behold and die:  they come:  they come 440
Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
And hollow underneath, like death.

FIRST FURY: 
Prometheus!

SECOND FURY: 
Immortal Titan!

THIRD FURY: 
Champion of Heaven’s slaves!

PROMETHEUS: 
He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here,
Prometheus, the chained Titan.  Horrible forms, 445
What and who are ye?  Never yet there came
Phantasms so foul through monster-teeming Hell
From the all-miscreative brain of Jove;
Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
Methinks I grow like what I contemplate, 450
And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy.

FIRST FURY: 
We are the ministers of pain, and fear,
And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, 455
We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
When the great King betrays them to our will.

PROMETHEUS: 
Oh! many fearful natures in one name,
I know ye; and these lakes and echoes know
The darkness and the clangour of your wings. 460
But why more hideous than your loathed selves
Gather ye up in legions from the deep?

SECOND FURY: 
We knew not that:  Sisters, rejoice, rejoice!

PROMETHEUS: 
Can aught exult in its deformity?

SECOND FURY: 
The beauty of delight makes lovers glad, 465
Gazing on one another:  so are we. 
As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers
The aereal crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim’s destined agony 470
The shade which is our form invests us round,
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.

PROMETHEUS: 
I laugh your power, and his who sent you here,
To lowest scorn.  Pour forth the cup of pain.

FIRST FURY: 
Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone, 475
And nerve from nerve, working like fire within?

PROMETHEUS: 
Pain is my element, as hate is thine;
Ye rend me now; I care not.

SECOND FURY: 
Dost imagine
We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes?