Time mocks emperors, particularly boastful ones. One reason “Ozymandias” is so often anthologized is that it conveys a message dear to poets. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.Īnd on the pedestal these words appear. Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias” has some fine lines about a hunter in a future age beholding “some fragment huge” in the wilderness “where London once stood.” But genius went into Shelley’s poem: A massive statue glorifying him proclaimed on its pedestal that he was the “king of kings.” The poets used this phrase and called the ancient pharaoh, whose statue lay in ruins, Ozymandias. The passage concerned Rameses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who squared off against Moses in Exodus. In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ozymandias,” perhaps the greatest of his short poems, when he and his banker friend Horace Smith sat down to compose dueling sonnets on a passage from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent (130).Moira Egan, European Correspondent (72).Mitch Sisskind - Correspondent at Large (381).
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