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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

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