Ozymandias, by 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.
4 responses to “Ozymandias, by Shelley”
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Was always one of my favourites from school, a type of evocative fragment, like: “Petra, that rose red city, half as old as time…”, and like; “he clasps the crag with crooked hands…..” and also like those lips in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Yours and Glen Colquhoun‘s.
Hey, me too, the only thing in English which analysing it made me like it more.
Exactly the same for me. Ozymandias was probably the only piece of art or literature that we analysed at school (35 years ago) that benefitted from analysis, and which has stayed with me ever since. Between 1970 and 2001, the only non-technical thing I read was T.E.Lawrence. Since 2001 I’m insatiable.