Lines 1-7

“Allegory,” which is organized into eleven five-line stanzas and a final three-line stanza, begins with the speaker offering to “console” the reader with music. The speaker's use of the pronoun “us” implies that there is a group of artists behind the creative effort, as at the bottom of Guston's painting, which lists “composer,” “painter,” “sculptor,” and “poet” on what appears to be a wave.

In lines 3 through 5, the speaker begins to say that “we” (probably referring, again, to the categories of artists listed in Guston's painting) are “caught in / this sphere” (possibly referring to the earth) where it does not matter whether Prometheus hears their song. This sentence continues over the stanza break between lines 5 and 6, which is an example of enjambment, a convention in which a phrase continues from one line of poetry to the next.

Lines 8-15

Lines 8 through 11 explain the predicament of Prometheus...