| |
| 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? | 5 |
| 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, | 10 |
| 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 | 15 |
| 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, | 20 |
| 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. | 25 |
| 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; | 30 |
| 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, | 35 |
| 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, | 40 |
| 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 | 45 |
| 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; | 50 |
| 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, | 55 |
| Which even in torture can descry, | |
| Its own concenter’d recompense | |
| Triumphant where it dares defy, | |
| And making Death a Victory. | |
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