Saturday poem #6 - Ozymandias

 

Shelley’s poem is apposite in a week when we see, perhaps, the beginning of the end of the Murdoch Empire. I suppose Shelley’s message is that all things turn to decay and dust including mighty monarchs and emperors. Nothing escapes the erosion of time, the poet warns us. I already imagine the satirists doing a skit of this short but wonderful piece of verse with ‘Rupert’ replacing ‘Ozymandias’, and instead of desert sand all around the fallen idol the wasteland of Wapping. In addition to the power of its themes and imagery, the poem is notable for its virtuosic diction. The rhyme scheme of the sonnet is unusual and creates a sinuous and interwoven effect. It’s well accepted that this poem was the result of a competition between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith, a financier, verse-parodist and author of historical novels. Smith’s rival sonnet is called, less memorably, In Egypt’s Sandy Silence and disadvantages itself early on by the gauche reference to ‘a gigantic leg’.

 

OZYMANDIAS (by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

 

I MET a Traveler 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 shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked 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!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.