Prometheus

Published in 1816

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Full Biography part 1
Full Biography part 2
Lord Byron (George Gordon) was born in London in January 1788. He published his first poems at tthe age of 19, at 21 started travelling, at 28 left England forever. He died during Greek Independence war in 1824. Most of his work was done during his journeys (1816-24). His most famoous works include Manfred, Cain and Childe Harold.

And Thou Art Dead, As Young and Fair
By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept
Darkness
Dear Doctor, I Have Read Your Play
The Destruction of Sennacherib
Don Juan: Dedication
Fare Thee Well
Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer
The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept
I Would I Were a Careless Child
Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog
John Keats
Lachin Y Gair
Lara: Canto The First (Excerpt)
Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull
Lines to Mr. Hodgson Written on Board the Lisbon Packet
Manfred
My Soul is Dark
Oh! Snatched Away in Beauty's Bloom
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-sixth Year
Prometheus
Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
The Eve of Waterloo
She walks in Beauty
There be None of Beauty's Daughters
We'll go no more a-roving
When we Two parted
Epistle To Augusta
Churchill's Grave
A Spirit Passed Before Me
On Chillon
Stanzas For Music
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:
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.

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