I first heard the classic phrase from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet – “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” – during one of Stuart Hall’s typically overblown football commentaries in the seventies, somehow managing to tie Shelley’s sublime lines to a gritty encounter between Everton and Spurs. The real deal, I found out later, concerns the fates of history, the ravages of time and the folly of hubris, rather than what was in fact a fifth consecutive nil-nil draw at Goodison Park (hence Hall was employing a certain degree of irony).
Percy Bysshe Shelley first published his sonnet in a January 1818 issue of The Examiner, a periodical that happened to be a champion of the young Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats and Byron. Shelley had written the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith. The two had spent Christmas 1817 together along with Shelley’s wife, Mary, when a sonnet-writing contest broke out, the subject being an Ancient Greek text which cited the inscription on a massive Ancient Egyptian statue:
“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.”
So both Shelley and Smith wrote a poem called Ozymandias and in fact Smith’s poem was also published in The Examiner, a few weeks after Shelley’s sonnet. Both poems explore the themes I mentioned above and how the legacies of kings are fated to decay into oblivion.
In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum’s acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the 13th century BC. The 7.25-ton fragment of the statue’s head and torso was expected to arrive in London in 1818 and it’s a fair inference to assume that Shelley and Smith were inspired by this. So here’s Shelley’s famous poem, followed, should you wish to compare, by Horace Smith’s less well-known offering.
Incidentally, you will perhaps have twigged that this wasn’t the only time that an evening with the Shelleys spent concocting literary challenges would lead to a famous literary work: the previous winter, a similar evening spent discussing ghost stories led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.
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 Horace Smith’s poem…
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.
