Prometheus

[FONT=Arial]Sorry, bollocks up the format, see below.
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[FONT=Arial]by: George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788-1824)[/FONT]

• 
  
  • ITAN! to whose immortal eyes
  • The sufferings of mortality,
  • Seen in their sad reality,
  • Were not as things that gods despise;
  • What was thy pity's recompense?
  • A silent suffering, and intense;
  • The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
  • All that the proud can feel of pain,
  • The agony they do not show,
  • The suffocating sense of woe,
  • Which speaks but in its loneliness,
  • And then is jealous lest the sky
  • Should have a listener, nor will sigh
  • Until its voice is echoless.
  • -----------------------------------------------
  • Titan! to thee the strife was given
  • Between the suffering and the will,
  • Which torture where they cannot kill;
  • And the inexorable Heaven,
  • And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
  • The ruling principle of Hate,
  • Which for its pleasure doth create
  • The things it may annihilate,
  • Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
  • 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;
  • The fate thou didst so well foresee,
  • But would not to appease him tell;
  • And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
  • And in his Soul a vain repentance,
  • And evil dread so ill dissembled,
  • That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
  • ---------------------------------------
  • Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
  • To render with thy precepts less
  • The sum of human wretchedness,
  • And strengthen Man with his own mind;
  • But baffled as thou wert from high,
  • Still in thy patient energy, In the endurance, and repulse
  • Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
  • Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
  • A mighty lesson we inherit:
  • Thou art a symbol and a sign
  • To Mortals of their fate and force;
  • Like thee, Man is in part divine,
  • A troubled stream from a pure source;
  • And Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny;
  • His wretchedness, and his resistance,
  • And his sad unallied existence:
  • To which his Spirit may oppose
  • Itself--and equal to all woes,
  • 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.