“I met a traveller from an antique land…” so beings the sonnet Ozymandias by Percy Shelly in 1818. ..    For some reason. this poem has been coming into my life this week. First in a short story  i was reading last night, then in a flash back to one of the most outrageously awfully wonderful Breaking Bad episodes by that same name. (you know when you know who shoots those other guys .. (no spoilers here) )

Like all good students of poetry.. i knew that the poem was written by Shelly .. but haven’t looked at it since.. what.. ? High school maybe

I learned from Wikipedia today that The poem Ozymandias was written as part of a small competition between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith..  That’s pretty interesting because if memory serves me, Shelly’s wife Mary wrote her masterwork Frankenstein as a competition as well..Competitive lot those Shelly’s

Anyway, both Shelley and Smith  agreed to write a poem about the find of  a large broken  staue of Ramses II (aka Ozymandias) in the Egyptian desert a few years earlier   All that was found were the statues legs sticking out of the barren dessert , and its broken  and vandalized torso and head lying face down nearby. . The existing fragments were soon to arrive in London for the British Museum.. ;    Heres whats left of it

The inscription on the base of the statue was translated as :

King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone should like to know my grandeur and reach of stature, let him surpass any of my achievements

Here’s what Shelly wrote about the statue and the quote

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.

and here’s what smith wrote

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 this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Dunno which one i like best.. history has chosen Shellys as the one that survived.. so who am i to argue.

Folks say that shelly was writing about the immortality of art…  I think its more about our own mortality..   ie. nothing we do ultimately matters that much..

I’ve been thinking about mortality alot  lately .. not my own so much.. but just the general concept

kinda makes me want to go and carve a statue or something

night all, night sam

-me