Tonight, I am going be reading two poems entitled Ozymandias. One from Percy Shelly and the other from his friend Horace Smith.
Shelly is, of course, the famed English Romantic poet. His version of the poem was first published January 1818 in The Examiner of London and later in various collections including a posthumous compilation published in 1826. Smith’s version was also published in The Examiner and later unfortunately retitled, On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below. This was published in Smith’s collection also verbosely entitled Amarynthus, The Nympholet: A Pastoral Drama, In Three Acts. With Other Poems.
Shelley wrote the poem in a friendly competition with Smith. Horace Smith, in addition to being a writer and poet, made a living as a merchant and working in finance. Shelley wrote of him, "Is it not odd that the only truly generous person I ever knew who had money enough to be generous with should be a stockbroker?”
Thinking of money, Shelley was the son of Timothy Shelley, a member of parliament. He attended Eton and later Oxford. He was expelled and cut off financially by his family, but being born into such security, it is hard to cry for him on the financial front.
The sonnet challenge occurred when Shelley and Smith spent Christmas together in 1817. Shelley and Smith both chose a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in Bibliotheca Historica, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work." In Shelley's poem, Diodorus becomes "a traveler from an antique land."
In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the pharaoh Ramesses II in the 13th century BC. The poem contest was likely inspired by Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in 1798 and by the British Museum attempting to acquire the Younger Memnon (photo below), a head-and-torso fragment of a statue of Ramesses II, which dated from era of his rule.
Let’s have Horace Smith’s version of Ozymandias first
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,—
Naught 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.
And now Shelley’s version:
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!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Both of those are beautiful. It is really hard to pick a favorite. Shelley’s poem is one of the best known in all of Western literature, but Horace Smith writes a good verse as well. At the very least, I am comfortable saying he deserves more attention and I’m glad to play a small part in reading his work. Both of them do drive the point home without belaboring it though, nothing lasts forever.