I am like one who stands where rise
The lone capes fringed with ice, and sees,
Beneath the cold of sunless skies,
The great sea stretch its wide degrees:
Who, watching for some sign of life,
With chilling blood and languid breath,
Feels, like the keen thrust of a knife,
The touch that heralds death.

The splendors of my youth have flown —
No more my temples meet the light
Set, like a deathless monarch's throne,
Along the crest of some vast height;
No more men seek my aid, or hold
My august presence fair and great.
Across my realms there long has rolled
The waves of adverse fate.

When Typhon and Hyperion stood,
With strong limbs swelling for the fray,
Where through the darkness of a wood
The fierce wind-trumpets sent their bray,
And I defied their lusty girth,
And hurled them through unfathomed space,
Gods hailed me as the lord of earth,
And glory lit my face.

To me the Assyrian made his prayer,
To me the Persian bent the knee,
And by the Nile, the sunlit air
Was glad with songs men sang to me:
The Grecian Phalanx sought my aid,
The Roman Legion owned my sway, —
My fierce bolts in the darkness made
Signs potent with dismay.

The centuries that passed were mine;
I ruled the founts of joy and tears,
And, like a giant, lay supine
Along the foam of surging years.
What need of watchfulness or arms?
I held the world within my hands,
And laughed, when came the low alarms
From Galilean lands.

What need of fear for one who bore
The cross of passion and of pain,
Where, tossed along a barren shore,
Life seethed, but could not break its chain?
Yet sands are mighty, and their mass
Drives back the strong and restless waves,
And when too late I woke, alas!
My realm was one of graves.

And slowly, step by step, my feet
Have sought the weary lands, that lie
Where stormy winds in fury meet,
And fiercely rend the leaden sky.
Beyond these sinks that vast unknown,
Where-through great meteors, swiftly hurled,
Gather the frothing wreck-waifs, blown
From off the sunlit world.