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 upon 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.
Internet
Notes
Shelley apparently wrote this in competition with his
friend Horace Smith, as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's in the
same magazine. It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes the
same moral point. It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's
verse; but in later collections Smith retitled it On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by itself in the
Deserts of
In
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 this forgotten
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Transient are the human achievements, the power, the
glory, the wealth, the empires: sic
transit gloria mundi—they all come and disappear in the waste of time.