Prometheus

The fate thou didst so well foresee,

Prometheus I

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Titan! to whose immortal eyes

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And in thy Silence was his Sentence,

The sufferings of mortality

And in his Soul a vain repentance,

Seen in their sad reality,

And evil dread so ill dissembled

Were not as things that gods despise;

That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

What was thy pity's recompense?

III

A silent suffering, and intense;

10

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To render with thy precepts less

All that the proud can feel of pain,

The sum of human wretchedness,

The agony they do not show,

And strengthen Man with his own mind;

The suffocating sense of woe,

But baffled as thou wert from high, 40

And then is jealous lest the sky

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

Until its voice is echoless.

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

II Titan! to thee the strife was given

A mighty lesson we inherit: 45

Between the suffering and the will,

Like thee, Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source;

And the inexorable Heaven,

And Man in portions can foresee

And the deaf tyranny of Fate, 50

And his sad unallied existence:

The things it may annihilate,

To which his Spirit may oppose

Refused thee even the boon to die:

Itself -- and equal to all woes,

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;

His own funereal destiny; His wretchedness, and his resistance,

Which for its pleasure doth create

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Thou art a symbol and a sign To Mortals of their fate and force;

Which torture where they cannot kill;

The ruling principle of Hate.

Still in thy patient energy, In the endurance, and repulse

Should have a listener, nor will sigh

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Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,

Which speaks but in its loneliness,

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But would not to appease him tell;

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And a firm will, and a deep sense, Which even in torture can descry Its own concenter'd recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy,

And making Death a Victory. 1816, Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)