Ozymandias
Ozzy Meets Harriet
no rest for the pharaoh
I met a traveler from a modern land,
and she’s like: “don’t you give me any lip!
Lie here — stay partly covered by the sand.
This picture will remind me of my trip.”
Her stylish shades obscure her upper face
but I well know the strength behind that tone.
It’s known to pharaohs throughout time and space,
and so I pose with her, a silent stone.
Thus captured, she will send me through the air:
“His name was Ozymandias, King of Kings”
and others will reply: “wish I was there!”
and add “oh, L.O.L, what ARE those things?”
And I’ll stay here, refusing to decay.
The sand dunes that preserve stretch far away.
Obscured as it is by the more modern myth of his wife’s ever more popular Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelly’s Ozymandias is nonetheless a classic that stands on its own “two vast and trunkless legs of stone”, as it where. A testament to the Romantic Age fascination with antiquity, it’s studied by students of English poetry, of sonnetry, of romanticism, and imitated by countless…
