"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.

"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.

And, 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.

Percy Shelley

Percy Shelley's poem, concerns the subject of the ancient mythical being known as Prometheus. In only a few melancholic lines it gives a brief insight into...