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

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

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

John Keats is a Romantic poet like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and John Clare.

Writing in the Petrarchan form, he composed the sonnet below after his friend Charles Cowden Clarke had introduced him to the translation of the Greek poet Homer by the Elizabethan dramatist George Chapman (circa 1559-1634). Clarke recalled how Keats “shouted with delight” at certain passages and then went home to write the poem.

“It is not hard to imagine Clarke’s amazement as he read the sonnet over,” Aileen Ward writes in John Keats: The Making of a Poet. “The poem was a miracle; not simply because of the mastery of form, or because Keats was only twenty when he wrote it, or because he wrote it in the space of an hour or two after a night without sleep [reading Chapman]. Rather because nothing in his earlier poetry gave any promise of this achievement: the gap between this poem and his summer work could only be leaped by genius. . . . The unity of form and feeling that begins in the first line and swells in one crescendo of excitement to the final crashing silence was instantaneous and unimprovable.”

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER

Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer¹ ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez² when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien³.

¹ deep-brow’d Homer – Homer, the great Greek intellect
² Cortez – an error of no import to this poem: it was the Spanish explorer Balboa, not Cortez, who first gazed upon the Pacific after crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513
³ Darien – an area in Panama

The World Is Too Much with Us

(William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, English poet who
served as poet laureate from 1843-1850)

“The World Is Too Much with Us”

These words could serve as the headline over an editorial in your daily paper, but here they form the title of a surprisingly up-to-date sonnet written more than two centuries ago.

William Wordsworth is one of the English Romantic poets, like Coleridge and Keats. These poets favor Nature as the source of happiness over the spiritual poverty of materialism they believe came with the Industrial Revolution. Many of their verses, like this one, make full use of the pathetic fallacy, bringing in Nature by ascribing human qualities and emotions to an inanimate object.

The sonnet below is in the Petrarchan form. The octave sets out the problem — man is out of tune with the world and is losing his soul to wasteful “getting and spending.” The sestet suggests a possible answer — to make himself “less forlorn,” man should gaze at Nature with the same wonder as beheld by the ancient pagans.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. — Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea¹,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus² rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton³ blow his wreathed horn.

¹ lea – meadow
² Proteus – sea god in Greek mythology who can take many different shapes
³ Triton – another sea god in Greek mythology; he blows on a twisted conch shell to control the sea

La belle dame sans merci

(La belle dame sans merci by William Russell Flint, 1880-
1969, Scottish artist and illustrator)

A ballad is a poem that tells the story of one event, often tragic, using repetition and simple language and dialogue. Its rhyme and rhythm make it easy to put the words to music. Originally, in medieval times, ballads were sung to accompany a dance. The words “ballad” and “ballet” are both derived from the Late Latin ballare or to dance.

Many ballads belong to the folk literature, written by anonymous authors and subject to changes, large and small, over the years. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poets came to favor this already popular poetic form and write their own literary ballads.

The poem below is considered by many to be one of the loveliest of the literary ballads. It begins when a person passing by on the side of a hill comes upon a knight at arms who seems lost and dazed. The knight describes his meeting with a beautiful lady without mercy.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the Lake
And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,
So haggard, and so woe begone?
The Squirrel’s granary is full
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast witherest too —

I met a Lady in the Meads,
Full beautiful, a faery’s child.
Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild —

I made a Garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant Zone
She look’d at me as she did love
And made sweet moan —

I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long
For sidelong would she bend and sing
A faery’s song —

She found me roots of relish sweet
And honey wild and manna dew
And sure in language strange she said
I love thee true —

She took me to her elfin grot
And then she wept and sigh’d full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And then she lulled me asleep
And there I dream’d, Ah Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale Kings, and Princes too
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried, La belle dame sans merci
Thee hath in thrall.

I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill’s side

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering;
Though the sedge is withered from the Lake
And no birds sing —

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

Bright Star

(Rosa Meditativa by Salvador Dali, 1904-1989,
Spanish Surrealist painter)

John Keats may have begun Bright Star before he met his beloved Fanny Browne. By the time of his final revision, however, it is clear that he was devoting this poem to her.

Two things to note — the reference to his own death and the comparison of Fanny to a star.

Consumption, as tuberculosis was called then, was still a fatal disease during Keats’s time. It had killed his mother and a brother and was now beginning to affect him. This made him painfully aware that he had only a little time left to live. More than once, Keats put this fear into words on paper, as in the beginning lines of a different sonnet:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

He also wrote of it in letters, such as one to Fanny on July 25, 1819: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

In that letter, he also compared Fanny to a celestial body: “I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen. Yours ever, fair Star.”

BRIGHT STAR

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite*,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

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

* Eremite – hermit

Study of the Object

(Transcription of Keats’s Ode on a Grecian
Urn by his brother George)

The verses below, from Zbigniew Herbert’s Study of the Object, could be read as a complement to this idea proposed by Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

from STUDY OF THE OBJECT

The most beautiful is the object
which does not exist

it does not serve to carry water
or to preserve the ashes of a hero

it was not cradled by Antigone
nor was a rat drowned in it

seen
from every side
which means
hardly anticipated

the hairs
of all its tines
join
in one stream of light

neither
blindness
nor
death
can take away the object
which does not exist

~ Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Polish poet

Ode on a Grecian Urn

(Sketch by Keats of a vase by Sosibios
the Athenian)

(This month, the poems are part of an on-going conversation among poets and painters. Many of the verses are examples of ekphrasis or literary commentary on a visual work of art.)

We begin with one of the most popular and well-known poems about a work of art. The vessel Keats is describing is most certainly a composite he created of real and imagined images.

As Keats is examining an urn decorated with scenes and figures, he sees the perfection of beauty captured permanently in art. Time stands still. Nothing will change. But that’s the rub. Is such unchangeable perfection more desirable than the imperfect transitory experiences of life?

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

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

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

To Fanny

(portrait of John Keats by William Hilton,
1786-1839, English painter)

When John Keats fell in love with the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, he was an impoverished poet with no prospects for marriage. He was also under a death sentence, stricken with the consumption or tuberculosis that had already killed a brother. Keats moved to Italy for his health and died there when he was only 25 years old, separated from his beloved.

The love that they felt for each other Keats recorded in his poems and the many letters that survive. “I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else,” he wrote to Fanny. “I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”

In another letter he told Fanny, “I have no limit now to my love. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs of religion. I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more. I could be martyred for my religion — love is my religion — I could die for you. My creed is love and you are its only tenet. You have ravish’d me away by a power I could not resist. . . . My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you. . . . Yours for ever.”

TO FANNY

I cry your mercy — pity — love — aye, love!
Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmask’d, and being seen — without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole, — all — all — be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of your love, your kiss, — those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast, —
Yourself — your soul — in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the midst of idle misery,
Life’s purposes, — the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

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

For a short article about Bright Star, the recent film depicting the love between Keats and Fanny, go to this site:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21014

(Please cut and paste the address if the link is not working.)