Ozymandias

(Percy Bysshe Shelly in Italy writing Prometheus Unbound,
a “closet drama” meant to be read out loud rather than
performed on stage, by Joseph Severn, 1793-1879, English
painter)

Sometimes poets direct their work to their colleagues. They conduct conversations in verse with other poets, like their responses to Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd. And they compete with each other, writing poems about the same theme, like Leigh Hunt’s and John Keats’s sonnets about a grasshopper and a cricket, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Horace Smith’s sonnets below about an ancient tyrant.

Both of today’s sonnets look at the fate of Ozymandias, believed to be Ramesses II of Egypt (1303-1213 B. C.), a pharaoh who built giant monuments, palaces, and temples in his own honor. A Greek historian of the first century B. C., Diodorus Siculus, recorded that the inscription on the base of one of Ramesses’ monuments read: “King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”

Both of these sonnets are composed in a variation of the Petrarchan form.

The first sonnet is by Horace Smith (1779-1849). In the octave, he describes the remains of a giant statue of a tyrant in a destroyed city of ancient Egypt. In the sestet, he imagines a time in the future when the city of London is similarly annihilated.

OZYMANDIAS

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 chase,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The second sonnet is by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), another Romantic poet like Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and John Clare. It is by far the more famous version.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveler 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 fed¹:
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.

¹ the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed – the mocking hand of the sculptor, and the tyrant’s heart that fed on his vanity

The Grasshopper and the Cricket

(Grasshopper by Raoul Dufy,
1877-1953, French artist)

One night in December, 1816, the poet Leigh Hunt and his friend John Keats heard the chirping of a cricket by the hearth in Hunt’s cottage. The two men challenged each other to write a sonnet about this.

Who won?

TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June, —
Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass!
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song, —
In doors and out, summer and winter, mirth.

~ Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), English essayist, critic, and poet

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s — he takes the lead
In summer luxury, — he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

~ John Keats (1795-1821), English Romantic poet