“Like one that on a lonely road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
This is a quote from the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I was reading it today, as I finally found my book on the Romantics on our bookshelf and got excited about rereading some of my favorites.
This stanza stood out to me today because of the situation I currently find myself in. It probably should not (if the goal is to be optimistic) have hit me so hard, but it did.
I am waiting for results from my CT scan and those results are very important to my future and, as my doctor has repeatedly reminded me, the results I need are not necessarily the results I should expect to get.
In the end, I feel as though I am walking down a foggy Victorian street with the premonition that a demon or fiend is close on my heals. Part of me does not want to look for fear of What I may find there. The feeling is a gross one, but that is where I am at. This feeling of dread is compounded by the fact that I have had a rough couple of days digestion wise and my tumor pain has been much more prominent this week than normal. Is this real? Or is this just fear manifesting itself. I guess we will have a better idea when the results come in. Fingers crossed.
This poem, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, along with Prometheus by Lord Byron and Ozymandias by Shelley are my Romantic favorites. Prometheus I love because of the sense of doing the right thing, even if you know the consequences will be bad.
Prometheus means forward thinking in Greek. The idea is that he could see the future. He chose to give man fire out of a sympathy for his plight as a mortal, and for that gift was gifted, himself, eternal life and punishment, chained to a rock where a bird came to eat his liver daily and at night it would grow back. He knew what his punishment would be, but did what he did anyway. Because it was the compassionate thing to do.
“The wretched gift eternity
Was thine—and thou hast borne it well.
all that the thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;”
I love this stanza. Zeus (the Thunderer) wanted Prometheus to share the future with him and as his reward he would be freed from the stone. Rather than do that Prometheus held his secret and suffered silently his torment. I love that, so did the Romantics. Shelley, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley all wrote works about Prometheus. Frankenstein is about Prometheus. It is easy to see why, when you take the time to think about it.
Shelley’s Ozymandias is a different animal. It is about a shattered statue of Ramses II standing alone in a swath of desert with a placard bragging about the immortality of his works. The irony should be obvious:
“…
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Pure solemn, somber beauty.
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