If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.
Love denied transforms into terror wielded. Antithesis sets the moral pivot: affection to fear, kinship to enmity. Fury becomes a mission, not a moment; he vows duration and focus. Shelley makes revenge an economy of pain—take what was taken. The line also reads like a broken prayer: if I cannot be blessed, I will become a curse. Its power lies in how understandable and terrifying it is. We feel the trap of needing to matter, even destructively.