The poet now known as Lord Byron was born George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th
Baron Byron, on
Lord Byron in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips, c. 1835 (courtesy of http://englishhistory.net/byron/contents.html)
Prometheus (1816)
����������� George Gordon, Lord Byron
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����������� 1
Titan! 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.
�����������
�
(Image of Prometheus and the vulture, courtesy of
http://www.pantheon.org)
����������� 2
Titan! To thee the strife was given
�� Between the suffering and the will,
�� Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
(Image of Valhalla courtesy of wikipedia.org)
And the deaf tyranny of fate,
The ruling principle of hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refused 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
(Image of Zeus courtesy of wikipedia.org)
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
�
(Image of
stretching rack courtesy of www.static.flickr.com)
The fate thou didst so well foresee
(Image of
Kreskin courtesy of www.chervokas.typepad.com)
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.
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����������� 3
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;
��
(Image of
Albert Einstein courtesy of www.westegg.com/einstein)
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:
(Image of
Ferdinand Saussure courtesy of www.personales.ciudad.com.ar)
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;
�
(Image of
Arcade Fire�s �Funeral� courtesy of amazon.com)
His wretchedness, and his resistance.
(Image of
Wretched record courtesy of www.popsike.com)
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his spirit may oppose
Itself�an equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concentred recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.
(Grim
reaper image courtesy of mythology.com)