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 sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

From the so-bad-that-they’re-good department…

“It appears that in 1817 Shelley held a sonnet-writing session with his friend, the poet Horace Smith. Both wrote a sonnet on the same subject, but while Shelley came up with Ozymandias, Mr Smith produced something so delightfully horrendous I simply have to indulge [myself] even further, and include it here as well.

The poem was cited by Guy Davenport of the University of Kentucky in a New York Times article a few years ago, which concluded: “Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.” “

– Leo Breebaart, in the Annotated Pratchett File v7a.0, which you can read

in its entirety at http://www.us.lspace.org/books/apf/index.html

— Thomas

Links

Shelley’s famous sonnet can be found at poem #22

Surprisingly enough, Ozymandias is the only poem of his to have featured on the Minstrels - I guess neither Martin nor myself are fans enough. Readers are invited to rectify the situation with guest submissions.

A web search for a biography of Horace Smith, Poet failed to turn up anything of interest. I wonder why.