(1818) PERCY BYSSE SHELLEY – OZYMANDIAS

 

I have a soft spot for the English Romantic poets. Yes – that’s capital-R Romanticism, for the cultural and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late eighteenth century and which still arguably holds sway in Western culture even today. Two of them – Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats – feature in the Top 10 itself. Two others – William Blake and Lord Byron – feature as honorable mentions. That leaves the last two of the big six – William Wordsworth and Percy Bysse Shelley.

Shelley may now perhaps best be known as the husband of Mary Shelley, author of the iconic Frankenstein. However, he has at least earned his place in my special mention cult and pulp entries, largely off the back of this poem.

Yes – there is other poetry by Shelley I enjoy, such as “To a Skylark” – even if it starts in a weird way to modern ears:

 

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert”

 

Yeah…what? But I can’t say mad at a poem that features these lines:

 

“We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

 

However, it is his sonnet Ozymandias, often anthologized and commonly taught in schools, that ranks as my favorite for this entry. And as it is a sonnet and hence short (sixteen lines), I can quote it here in full:

 

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 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!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharoah Ramesses II – or Ramesses the Great, who reigned in 1279-1213 BC. The theme is obvious – human hubris in the face of time. Decline and fall – even for the greatest rulers and the empires they forge (although of course Shelley with his radical political views was quite happy to speed them along). Ramesses now reduced to empty ironic words on a statue, the statue itself fallen into pieces and ancient Egypt itself, known mostly for its giant tombstones and broken statuary.