Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” has long been one of my favourite poems. I used to have it memorized and was fond of using to explain the concept of irony.
But I never knew that he wrote it in competition with a poet friend and houseguest, Horace Smith, whose sonnet of the same name was published a month later in the same publication (The Examiner).
The Poems
“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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 shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d 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.
“Ozymandias” by Horace Smith
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart 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.
The Inspiration
The sonnet competition took place in December 1817.
The poets must have been inspired by The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian written in the first century BC. Shelley had requested Diodorus’ works in Latin in December 1812. The English translation by George Booth was published in 1814.
Booth describes a colossal statue of Ramases II and translates its inscription thus: ‘I am Osymandyas, king of kings; if any would know how great I am, and where I lie, let him excel me in any of my works’
In Shelley’s poem the inscription reads, ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Smith’s version is, “I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone, / “The King of Kings; this mighty City shows / “The wonders of my hand.”
The statue itself was brought from Egypt to England in 1818 and can still be seen in the British Museum (see above photo). Of course Shelley’s poem was only inspired by the statue and his description is very different than the real thing. Notably his statue is lying in a desert, while the actual statue stood at a temple entrance and depicts a seated monarch.
A Manuscript
My Sources
The British Library record for The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian
Shelley’s Ghost (A Bodleian Libraries exhibition in partnership with The New York Public Library)
“An introduction to ‘Ozymandias’” by Stephen Hebron
“Ozymandias – The Bodleian Draft” by Patrick Gillespie
For Further Research
If you’d like to research more of Shelley’s works, take a look at The Shelley-Godwin Archive.
“The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers. The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library. In total, these partner libraries contain over 90% of all known relevant manuscripts.”
Featured Image: Statue of Ramesses II from The British Museum
If you have a favourite poem you’d like me to research, let me know in the comments below.