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 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.”
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On
a Stupendous Leg of Granite,
Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription
Inserted Below
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 that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where
London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What
wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once
dwelt in that annihilated place.
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