Hymn to Adversity
Daughter
of
Jove,
relentless
Power,
Thou
tamer
of
the
human
breast,
Whose
iron
scourge
and
tort'ring
hour
The
Bad
affright,
afflict
the
Best!
Bound
in
thy
adamantine
chain
The
Proud
are
taught
to
taste
of
pain,
And
purple
Tyrants
vainly
groan
With
pangs
unfelt
before,
unpitied
and
alone.
When
first
thy
Sire
to
send
on
earth
Virtue,
his
darling
child,
designed,
To
thee
he
gave
the
heav'nly
Birth,
And
bade
to
form
her
infant
mind.
Stern
rugged
Nurse!
thy
rigid
lore
With
patience
many
a
year
she
bore:
What
sorrow
was,
thou
bad'st
her
know,
And
from
her
own
she
learned
to
melt
at
others'
woe.
Scared
at
thy
frown
terrific,
fly
Self-pleasing
Folly's
idle
brood,
Wild
Laughter,
Noise,
and
thoughtless
Joy,
And
leave
us
leisure
to
be
good.
Light
they
disperse,
and
with
them
go
The
summer
Friend,
the
flatt'ring
Foe;
By
vain
Prosperity
received,
To
her
they
vow
their
truth,
and
are
again
believed.
Wisdom
in
sable
garb
arrayed
Immersed
in
rapt'rous
thought
profound,
And
Melancholy,
silent
maid
With
leaden
eye,
that
loves
the
ground,
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray (born Dec. 26, 1716, London—died July 30, 1771, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.) English poet whose “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” is one of the best known of English lyric poems. Although his literary output was slight, he was the dominant poetic figure in the mid-18th century and a precursor of the Romantic movement.