Ozymandias

[MikeK]

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Here's a companion poem to Shelley's famous "Ozymandias", written by Horace Smith:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

And here's what is says about that poem on Wikipedia:

Percy Shelley apparently wrote this sonnet [Ozymandias] in competition with his friend Horace Smith, as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's in the same magazine. It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes the same moral point. It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's verse; but in later collections Smith retitled it "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below".


Am I alone in thinking that this is a damn fine poem? Why, then, is Shelley's the one far more remembered? Read over Smith's poem a few times and please explain to me why it has been ignored. Is it solely because the famous Shelley is the author of "Ozymandias"? (And I don't mean here to denigrate Shelley's poem; "Ozymandias" is actually one of my favorites.)

[JBI]

It's an alright poem, but quite frankly I find it one of the lesser Shelley works. It is interesting, but the poem doesn't sustain itself as well as, for instance, his Ode to the West Wind, or his Skylark. This seems to be one of those open-and-shut cases of poetry, where the poem doesn't drift off enough from its implied meaning, and seems to not offer much beyond the basic level. Shelley's other works on the other hand, often seem to erupt with meaning, whereas this one has the cliché time motif, which has been central since the Renaissance in English (and perhaps before that), and doesn't seem to offer much beyond it.

I think, though, the dominant feature which makes it a million times better than the second version is the fact that Shelley seems to have understood metre, and not to have end stopped every line so blandly. Because of this, his last line packs more punch than the alternative couplet, which seems rather expected, and boring. Also, another feature is that he doesn't smack you so carelessly over the head with the "meaning" (if such a term can be used for poetry, though don't get me wrong, I don't advocate all readings carry the same truth). The second poem is rather weak, from beginning until the end, and seems as if any minor sonnetteer could have written it.

I would also note, that the double entendre on despair didn't exist in Shelley's time, and is only one using a modern connotation of the word.