“Ozymandias” (January 1818)
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” as a part of a friendly competition with the poet Horace Smith, in response to the British Museum’s acquisition of a large statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Their poems were published three weeks apart, in The Examiner, a London-based journal.
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.”
