1. Shelley’s Wrinkled Lip, Smith’s Gigantic Leg

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “OZYMANDIAS”

The younger Romantics were the first generation of British poets—perhaps the first generation of poets anywhere—to write poems contemplating remnants of the ancient world. This interest in the past, in the pastness of the past, infused the Romantic sublime, for there is no more useful reminder of mortality than a vine-covered ruin. If you wanted your own ruin and had the means, local masons could build what was called a folly, the make-believe remains of abbey or castle. (Byron might have indulged himself had he not been Byron—in any case, his ancestral home had been built next to the ruins of an ancient abbey.) If you were without means, if you could not afford the Grand Tour, you had to take your inspiration from books, as Keats did in “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” Or you had to visit museums.

England was not always the warehouse of empire. When the British Museum opened in 1759, it contained few antiquities amid the thousands of books, stuffed animals, and dried plants. Not until the 1780s did the museum begin to acquire Brobdingnagian fragments, like the colossal sandaled foot found near Naples and purchased from William Hamilton. Among the wrack of vanished civilizations were prodigious buildings (the Great Pyramid at Giza covered more ground than St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s combined), as well as sky-scraping heroic statues, often preserved in mutilated form. These statues were a particular curiosity to the British, who could offer, as massive fragments of antique civilization, not much more than an earthen dike or two, some lengths of Roman wall, and Stonehenge. Articles about statues and other objects from the Near East filled the reviews of the day and drove the public to the museum, sometimes in eager anticipation of objects to come.

The older Romantics, however much they loved books (we owe our deepest knowledge of Coleridge’s imagination to his marginal scrawls—if he ever returned a borrowed book, it was defaced with his genius), depended on the close observation of nature. Wordsworth hated the city and couldn’t wait to escape it—in his devious sonnet “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” he looked upon London as if it were another landscape. When he hiked above Tintern Abbey, he was more interested in the hills and cataracts than in the abbey’s lost majesties—the roofless stones famously make no direct appearance in the poem. This is not to say that Wordsworth and Coleridge failed to hold ruins in due Romantic reverence—fallen walls litter their work, but they are largely local.1 The second generation of Romantics, who in the main preferred city life, were drawn to ruins far flung—perhaps their fascination derived partly from discoveries made during the Napoleonic wars. (Byron’s use of Greek ruins in the early cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [1812] may have been crucial for thinking of ruins in political terms.) These late Romantics were not counterfeiting antique poetry, like Thomas Chatterton or James Macpherson, or like the Elizabethans dramatizing twice-told tales of Caesar, or Sejanus, or Tamburlaine. The monumental past was newly available in journal and book and museum, as well as by travel—and poets were quick to make use of it.

The awe these artifacts instilled in viewers should not be understated. The illiterate souls who came across the mammoth ruins, long after the civilizations had collapsed, were dumbfounded by what they saw—some of the secrets of building the pyramids are secrets still. The world that emerged from the Dark Ages had been staggered by the achievements of its distant ancestors. It did seem, especially to peoples without history, that in those days Titans ruled.

We think of the Romantics as the embodiment of imagination, not fancy; of the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as Wordsworth had it, not cautious artifice; of “incidents and situations from common life,” not gossip of dead kings.2 Yet in some ways the Romantics were just as much in love with artifice as the Augustans before them. Inspiration cannot derive mystically from nature if it can be poured out on demand, from a tap; but some of the Romantics, as a kind of parlor trick, loved to write when inspiration was forced. Think of that gloomy June evening on Lake Geneva during the summer of 1816—the notorious Year Without a Summer. The company having diverted itself with a book of supernatural tales, Byron (for he was the host) proposed that each write a ghost story.3 They pottered about in prose—John William Polidori supposedly writing of a “skull-headed lady”4—but eventually gave up the task. All but one, that is: Shelley’s eighteen-year-old lover Mary Godwin, who had been listening when talk during the previous weeks had strayed to galvanism and the reanimation of corpses, wrote the first draft of Frankenstein. (By the end of the year, she was Mary Shelley.) The discarded germ of Byron’s own idea, published at the end of Mazeppa (1819), is the grandfather of all vampire tales in our literature.

One of the many ways to pass a London evening with Leigh Hunt was to accept his challenge to write a poem in fifteen minutes. He would prescribe the theme, usually choosing a sonnet as the frame. (The sonnet-mad decade of the 1590s was almost matched when the Romantics revived the form.) We have at least four poems Keats wrote in Hunt’s verse duels,5 as well as one by Shelley, whose sonnet on the Nile, written one evening in February 1818, was not discovered among Hunt’s papers until half a century after Shelley’s death.6 Hunt comes off rather well in these competitions (his sonnet on the Nile is one of his better),7 Keats rather poorly. Shelley’s Nile poem is workmanlike, but the one he had written on an Egyptian theme a few weeks earlier, at home in Marlow after Christmas, is a different matter. Having read about the ruin of a colossal granite statue in Egypt, most critics believe, he and his friend Horace Smith provoked each other to sonnets. It remains Shelley’s best-known poem.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart. 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!’

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”8

The first pleasure of this traveler’s tale is the artless contrivance of the traveler himself. This nameless and faceless creature, who exists only to spin his thirteen lines, is not compelled, like the Ancient Mariner, to seek absolution by constantly rehearsing his story. The traveler doesn’t even provide a proper introduction, launching into his lines in medias res. If character can be read in such things, it should be read in the sudden outburst, as well as in the scene described—yet we have no context in which a psychology can be enacted, as in “My Last Duchess” or “Resolution and Independence” (or even in Carroll’s wicked parody of the latter). If you want to know this character’s character, the poem offers nothing more than his expedient appearance.

The traveler, however, relieves the speaker of the moral burden of the tale, which is charged to someone else’s account—however much we are aware that this Marco Polo is imaginary, his is the moral judgment and his the topos almost as ancient as Ozymandias himself: the transience of earthly things, the transience of earthly kings. “How are the mighty fallen!” 2 Samuel has it. (The traveler’s absence in Shelley’s raw early draft proves him a tactical second thought.) This removes the poem just beyond Keats’s condemnation, when he remarked that “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us” and asked whether the reader was “to be bullied into a certain Philosophy.”9 All poems have such designs; but in the successful poem we don’t particularly notice them, or we come to believe the designs our own.

Ozymandias was the Greek name for the greatest pharaoh of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty, Rameses II. Rameses is a peculiar choice for Shelley’s poem because he was one of the few pharaohs whose temples have survived three millennia more or less intact—the triumphal architecture of his long kingship includes some of the ruins at Abu Simbel, Luxor, and Karnak. Shelley did not intend to write history; even had he wanted to, detailed knowledge of the Egyptian dynasties had to wait for Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics. However accidental, the irony of Shelley’s choice confirms the rupture between past and present that dominates the poem.

The ruins so central to the Romantic age have a curious pathos the action of the poem must tease out and modify. The following November, Shelley was strolling amid the overgrown stones of the Colosseum. As he wrote in an unfinished fragment:

The great wrecked arches, the shattered masses of precipitous ruin, overgrown with the younglings of the forest, and more like chasms rent by an earthquake among the mountains than like the vestige of what was human workmanship—what are they? … It is because we enter into the meditations, designs, and destinies of something beyond ourselves that the contemplation of the ruins of human power excites an elevating sense of awfulness and beauty.10

There is perhaps a pathos to all broken things (rusty mine-machinery proved seductive to Auden), but the sonnet’s initial grand vision of amputated legs and mutilated head is destroyed by the ugliness of the sculpted face. The traveler could see this sneering face only if certain conditions were met: it must have been “half sunk” in the sands, with the mouth left visible.11 The head must therefore be lying on its side or perhaps partly upside-down. That would not be an image far from Shelley’s radical mind when he thought of tyrants. The disembodied head would look as if Pharaoh had been executed by guillotine.

After five lines, Shelley has a formal problem. The rhyme scheme, odd lines rhyming on -and, the even on -oun or some variant (in British English, stone and frown are near neighbors in rhyme but not identical), requires another rhyme on the latter—but here the Petrarchan scheme breaks down. This is not beyond the liberties the Romantics took with the sonnet, though the effect is a mild breach of expectation, a small but sharp deceit in harmony. Perhaps only by chance has the poet placed here the betrayal of the king:

“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.”

The poet did not lack rhymes: “alone,” “bemoan,” “condone,” “disown,” “dethrone,” and even “overthrown” are near to the theme. He must have seen greater advantage in a different line of thought.

Forming this indictment of the king in the very art that is his legacy, his sole legacy, Shelley finds himself in a syntactical thicket. The sculptor read certain passions in the king’s expression—the synecdoche is strongly willed. The statue offers two readings (two texts, as it were): what is carved at the king’s feet and what, as we say metaphorically, is written on his face. The syntax here might first seem a list: the series composing the subject of the relative clause (“whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer”) could have been balanced by objects in the “that” clause—the sculptor read (1) those passions, (2) the hand, and (3) the heart. Unhappily, this makes no sense. Because of the interrupting participial phrase, we don’t immediately register that “survive” is a transitive verb—the passions don’t simply survive; they survive “the hand that mocked them” as well as “the heart that fed [them].” The hand is the sculptor’s; the heart, the pharaoh’s. The pronoun is problematic, too, but the poet cannot have meant “the hand that mocked [these lifeless things]” unless the king was mocking his own sculpture. Similar superficially plausible readings (the “passions” can’t be “stamped” on the “hand that mocked them,” because Shelley’s statue no longer has a sculpted hand) would require a greater degree of ingenuity than the poem can probably bear. Shelley’s syntax in this long crowded sentence is troublesome enough (there are four relative clauses and one subordinate clause) without being monstrous. A grammar teacher could do worse than have his students parse the sentence—and all its false variants.

Shelley has exceeded the grace of his means, but the thought is elegant—the sculptor is gone, the king is gone, but the passions that chill the viewer have survived the intervening centuries. (It is doubtful that the poet had learned enough about the early excavations of the tombs to realize that the king’s salted liver or lungs might have been preserved in what was later called a Canopic jar. If Rameses possessed a heart, it would have been left in his mummified body.) Neither the traveler nor Shelley could be certain that the passions (“its sculptor well those passions read”) had been rendered accurately—the traveler no doubt judged them by the inscription. If such emotions could be read in the face, Shelley might be intimating that hieroglyphs tell us no more than can be deciphered in the statues. Not every passing traveler would be literate: Shelley’s imagined statue offers an alternate text—that of the face—for those who cannot read. Had he known anything about the conventional art of the pharaohs, however, he would not have invented so grim an expression—pharaohs ruled their temples with lofty impersonality, their expression no less impassive than the plaster or stone that bore them. To the Egyptian sculptor of that period, one pharaoh looked pretty much like another—personality came much later.

It’s easy to lose the subtlety of Shelley’s thought in the coils of syntax. The tyrant’s power is corrupt from the start, if he cannot command basic loyalty from the sculptor. Artists have been murdered for less. The pharaoh is not blind to the sneer or frown—they are exactly what he wants. It is only time that has forced judgment upon them. Time has done a better job than the sculptor at providing a comeuppance. Shelley hated tyrants (few poets put in a good word for them); but his pleasure in this broken sneer, this ruined frown, must lie in the schadenfreude difficult to avoid when any high figure is brought low by his own hand. We love an art that shows us the self-delusion of the sitter, just as we despise one that reveals the self-delusion of the artist. Having seen through someone else’s deceptions, no doubt we feel immune to our own.

The poem’s sestet is almost an afterthought, but few afterthoughts have been more cunning:

“And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!’

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Some critics mark the turn only in the last three lines, which are taken as an abrupt break of thought. However tied into the preceding sentence, the pedestal’s words read like a summary caption or museum label (or a caricature’s speech balloon), observation becoming interpretation. The shift in gaze from head to pedestal is part of this summation—it prepares the final vision, where the dead king’s words do not echo amid the resounding stones of his great works but are lost in the vacancy of nowhere. Lines 9–11 act like a hinge. This is another way of toppling a tyrant—in the poem, the head is mounted above the inscription only because the lines follow the traveler’s eye. The pharaoh’s head really lies at his feet.

It’s a minor point of construction, but Shelley must have felt some rupture after the eighth line, even as his rhymes knitted the divided sonnet together. The scheme, in the end, is ababacdc/edefef—some rhymes are over- or underrepresented. If “these lifeless things” bridges the gap by rhyming with “King of Kings,” only a half-deaf critic would fail to detect a thematic rhyme and a thematic criticism—the great king is now reduced to lifeless art. Art, in the end, is what has remained. No doubt this is some comfort to artists, or was at least to Shelley.

Hubris is an act of insolence or presumption, not, as we sometimes take it, pride. We know that “pride goes before a fall,” though folk editing has reduced the force of Proverbs 18, which reads, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Insolence must be directed at someone greater. Shelley would not have seen it this way, as he was an atheist. Neither would Rameses the Great, as he was a god. To Shelley, the gesture would have been empty—we are humbled by time, not gods. Time is the only god the atheist acknowledges.

The idea beneath the poem was no doubt current. One of Thomas Bewick’s “vignettes” in History of British Birds (1797) shows a donkey rubbing its hindquarters against a leaning and partly legible memorial-stone that reads “Battle … Splendid Victory … Immortal.”12 Bewick later remarked that this was the “proper use, at last, of all warlike monuments.”13 Another vignette showed a man pissing against a fragment of what may be Hadrian’s Wall.14

To feel small before the immensity of the universe is one thing; to feel insignificant before the work of man quite another—the glory of the achievement is embodied more in the face of Ozymandias than in the inscription. It is the face that makes him disconcertingly human, a man and more than a man. That “passions” survive animates the devastation. (Museums love statues or mummies, the human remnants—we long for the anthropomorphic. Curators are never much interested in bare blocks of granite.)

The sonnet’s final lines open outward to a view, and there perhaps lies the secret of the poem’s power. Such unexpected vistas, onto unseen valley or snow-capped mountain, usually mark sudden access of the sublime; but here the lift in spirit before nature’s grandeur, as the poem abandons the arrogant, sneering king, is immediately crushed—the view has breadth and depth, but the breadth and depth of a vast waste. That is a more eloquent judgment on ambition than anything Shelley might say, and he benefits from a second drama of opposition: the contrast between the king’s vaunted works and their absolute erasure.

“Decay” may refer only to the gargantuan fragments, but perhaps in Shelley’s mind shards of the vanished whole litter the sands. “Level” suggests the amplitude of destruction—in this imaginary Egypt, there are no dusty tells to betray a lost city. The land has been washed clean as the Margate sands, as if after the Flood. The most vigorous word in these closing lines, however, is “wreck,” which originally referred to something cast ashore by the tide, later the wreck of a ship. Only in the day of Pope did it begin to refer to the shattered remains of something demolished, and only in the hour of the Romantics to anything in a state of ruin.

Shelley used the word some thirty times, perhaps most hauntingly in his curious lyric-drama Hellas (1822): “If Greece must be / A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble.”15 He is alluding to the myth of Osiris, one of the most ancient Egyptian gods. “Colossal” comes down to us through Herodotus, who first used it to describe these very Egyptian statues. But just as “colossal” holds within it memory of the Colossus of Rhodes, that later wonder (for it postdates the ruin of Thebes), is it far fetched to suggest that “colossal Wreck” did not quite conceal from Shelley its nautical origins? British knowledge of the East, and the public inheritance of the rubble of Egypt, came after the Battle of the Nile, which left the burnt or sunken wreckage of the Orient (Napoleon’s flagship), the Mercure, the Hercule, and many another, names redolent of failed conquest and half-forgotten gods.

What is most remarkable about this coda, however, is that it refuses to point a moral. The results of the pharaoh’s hubris are so devastating, there is no need to comment upon them. Shelley knows how much he has to say, but he also knows how much he doesn’t—the ending falls like a trip-hammer. The long tail to his poem goes unremarked. We must read his lines remembering where they were written: in a country lush with greenery, and without deserts. (The poet wrote at a time when many men never left their home villages. Tales of Egypt were tales of the moon.) The implication is that once, long ago, the sands had held a vast and thriving civilization. The extent of the loss is as terrifying as the sparsity of the material remains and their giant size. In the early dynastic period, great reaches of Egypt still possessed sweeping savannahs; but by the hour of the New Kingdom, fifteen hundred years later, much of this landscape had already turned to sand. (The Sahara is now forty times larger than all Britain.) The poem shrewdly—no doubt luckily more than uncannily—records the devastation of a natural world.

Leigh Hunt published the sonnet in the Examiner of January 11, 1818,16 two weeks after it was written—the poem lay beneath the heading “Original Poetry,” in an issue that included articles on distressed seamen, the Poor Laws, and a painting by Benjamin West, as well as police reports (a “celebrated comedian” had been charged with using “threatening language,” a gang of robbers infested Hyde Park) and a bit of scandal involving a “young Gentleman” who had resolved “to quit the country for ever.”17 Shelley used the pseudonym Glirastes, a macaronic compound probably meaning “Dormouse lover.” (“Dormouse” was Shelley’s pet name for Mary.)18 He had made a few changes to his fair copy before publishing the poem, sharpening “wrinkled lips” to “wrinkled lip” (“wrinkled lips” might have suggested age) and reversing “remains beside” to the poetic “beside remains.” More importantly, “And on the pedestal these words appear” was originally the flatter, verb-deprived “And on the pedestal, this legend clear.”19 “Appear” lets the words rise out of the concealing sands, almost a quiet acknowledgment that they could not have been deciphered in Shelley’s day, had they still existed.20

In the version I have printed, I have retained the antique spelling of “desart” and the separation of “nothing” into “no thing” on the authority of Shelley’s fair copy, which lies in one of his notebooks on a page that also contains a small faint sketch of some trees. Bound in boards and trimmed with red leather, the volume was likely sold as an artist’s sketch-book. On the reverse of the elegantly inscribed fair copy, there’s a clumsy sketch of a mountain reflected in a lake, as well as calculations on account, some Cicero, and drafts of various poems (crossed to conserve space), including the false start of “Ozymandias,” some two dozen lines that reveal the poem’s crude beginnings.

Draft of Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias.”

Source: MS. Shelley e. 4, fol. 85v, BoDdleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Used by permission.

At the top of the draft page, Shelley wrote the crucial line, “My name is Ozymandias—King of Kings,” the axle on which the poem turns. He made five attempts at a line about the pedestal, the last stating that the ruined statue “stands by Nile,” probably placing it in the necropolis across from Luxor. Though he hasn’t started to shape the poem, Shelley was already trying to tie the lines into rhyme: “The wrecks of a colossal image stand” lies canceled above “Quiver thro sultry mist, thr beneath the sand.” The mist is a nice touch, but it is atmospheric filler that doesn’t fit the later idea of a desert. (The plural “wrecks” suggests the scattered fragments slyly omitted from the finished poem.) Shelley must have thought the statue marble, as he wrote, “two trunkless legs of marble grey.”

The drafts of every poem are the wreckage from which it is built, and these halting lines remain the ghostly predecessor. The brilliance came after the wreckage, including the chain of hearsay that serves, like the final line (“The lone and level sands stretch far away”), as an act of perspective in which the view fades into the distance—the poet relates what a traveler said about what a ruined statue recorded of the boast of a dead king. The very rough lines are the fragments of something yet to be made whole—the limbs, in other words, of Osiris.

HORACE SMITH, “OZYMANDIAS”

What of Shelley’s rival in sonnet writing, the indefatigable Horace Smith, stockbroker poet? Shelley once said of his friend, according to Leigh Hunt, “He writes poetry and pastoral dramas, and yet knows how to make money, and does make it, and is still generous!”21 (You can hear the wonder still.) The Examiner published Smith’s poem a few weeks after Shelley’s, and under the same title; but that may have been an editorial intervention to emphasize that the poems, as a note from the author explained, shared the same source of inspiration: “The subject which suggested the beautiful Sonnet, in a late number, signed ‘Glirastes,’ produced also the enclosed from another pen.”22 When Smith collected the sonnet in his book of miscellaneous verse, Amarynthus, the Nympholept (1821), his title was slightly longer:

ON A STUPENDOUS LEG OF GRANITE, DISCOVERED STANDING BY ITSELF IN THE DESERTS OF EGYPT, WITH THE INSCRIPTION INSERTED BELOW

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 that 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.23

This was followed by a sonnet to Shelley. However the two friends came to write these sonnets, not only did they use versions of the same inscription, but their lines contained certain echoes—Shelley’s “lone and level sands” lies close to “Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,” and Smith’s “The only shadow that the desert knows” (like the gnomon of a gigantic sundial) is visually more arresting than the dramatic “Nothing beside remains.” (In the Examiner text, which differs only trivially, Smith had spelled the word “desart,” like Shelley.) Smith’s London is Cato’s Carthage, a starker figure than Shelley’s vague “works.” A poem consists not simply of images, however, but images set in the context of argument; and here the stockbroker is at a disadvantage.

Smith did not have the judgment a better poet requires. The longer title makes the poem almost redundant. (The title isn’t a hint or a fingerpost so much as a movie preview.) The title also unhappily emphasizes Smith’s major poetic mishap—that poor leg! A disembodied granite arm has pathos, a granite leg nothing but bathos. Shelley mitigates the potential farce in part by emphasizing the once-complete sculpture (he follows with immediate reference to the shattered head), in part by insisting on a pair of legs and finally by placing the verb after the legs—“stand” is forcefully lodged at the beginning of the following line. Yet where those “legs of stone” seem oddly majestic, Smith’s solitary “gigantic leg” is anticlimactic and ridiculous. In Shelley’s draft, though he had written “two trunkless legs,” further down he canceled a “shattered leg”—perhaps his notion briefly coincided with Smith’s.

No doubt Smith felt that the mighty leg alone would be enough to awe his reader, but perhaps he didn’t reckon with the unintended suggestion of war amputation (London was rife with King George’s mutilated soldiers, reduced to beggary) or, worse, of a king reduced to hopping. Even his positioning of the verb (identical to Shelley’s) doesn’t save him, because he has unhappily reversed the syntax—a standard poetic technique then, to be sure, but one that backfires here.

Smith’s second mistake is to make his stone speak. The metonymy is precious and artful, catching the rhyme at cost, where Shelley gives the words directly to the pharaoh. Too, Shelley has placed the inscription as a climax of hubris; Smith needs to get it out of the way because he has another end in view. (“The city’s gone!” is too eager to shock—Shelley’s lingering, paced revelation is far subtler.) Apart from their clownish whimsy, the first half-dozen lines of Smith’s poem are forgettable—but then something unexpected occurs. The lines “Nought but the leg remaining to disclose / The site of that forgotten Babylon” place that amputated leg in the vast city that once surrounded it. That a city the equal of Babylon could vanish without trace is a conceit with theatrical flair. (The rhyme “gone” and “Babylon” deepens the loss.) In the sestet, the stockbroker comes into his own:

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.

We move from the present to some impossibly future day when even London shall be waste ground, overgrown like the Roman Forum with shrubs and vines. (Through most of the nineteenth century, the Forum was not the “long, clean, livid trench” Zola later called it but a great woodsy meadow filled with cattle and churches ancient as well as Baroque, the last now long since razed.)24 The absoluteness of “annihilated” is total; but the Latin, embedded here, offers not just an elevated diction, full of a stateliness now dead, but a terrible vision of the Roman Empire brought low, reduced to the scraps of its tongue in those lands it once conquered. “Stood” is emphasized like no other word in the poem, and the implicit “fell” rises in ghostly partnership. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had been published a few decades before.

The wolf would have been an image more highly charged in Smith’s day; though the last English wolf had been killed probably early in the previous century, the wolves of Scotland and Ireland had been hunted to extinction within living memory. We must imagine the hunter, headlong in his career through brush and thicket, suddenly arrested by this sight—“wilderness” implies savage and unchecked growth. The lines may be a memory of Henry IV, Part II: “O my poor kingdom …! / … Thou wilt be a wilderness again, / Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!”25 The wild and rank verdure stands in florid contrast to Shelley’s stark wastes. Finding some immense stone fragment of a lost city, the hunter is so stunned he stops cold. (Here was exactly the power of the sublime to halt a man in the blind course of his existence, to make him contemplate and reflect.) The hunter is Shelley’s traveler hurled into the future, but he serves a more subtle purpose as the reader’s filtering consciousness. He’s no archeologist (a term that appeared only a few years after the poem); any conclusion he derives about the makers of this fragment must be only a guess.

Perhaps Smith had read Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, where Anna Laeticia Barbauld saw a future where all Europe would be laid waste and “England, the seat of arts, be only known / By the gray ruin and the mouldering stone.” Strangers, “when midst fallen London, they survey / The stone where Alexander’s ashes lay, / Shall own with humbled pride the lesson just / By Time’s slow finger written in the dust.”26 Shelley was certainly reading her two years later.27 Less than a generation after, a similar trope animated a famous passage by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who in 1840, reviewing a work by his great rival von Ranke, was moved to say of the Catholic Church:

She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain—before the Frank had passed the Rhine—when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch—when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.28

It’s a haunting thought, London destroyed. (The idea, usually applied to New York or Los Angeles, has become a Hollywood commonplace.) It proves equally disturbing that in Smith’s poem no living man recalls the city, that even the name of that distant people has been effaced. By “unrecorded,” the poet must mean not just in the hunter’s own literature and history, if he had them—the race itself has left no record. No inscription survives, at least none seen. Which ruin in London did the poet have in mind? What great lump would be equal to the oppressive wreck of Ozymandias? Presumably Smith meant a fragment of Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, or the Tower. This future devastated London lies in contrast to the ancient Egypt revealed by the maimed statue of the great pharaoh—but are we to imagine all that remains is a hulking fragment or a landscape hillocky with viny wreckage half concealed?

That awe felt by the hunter is reminiscent of a poem that had appeared in the Examiner (Hunt’s journal, recall) scarcely a year before. That poem ended:

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific, and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.29

There is the closing view whose expectation Shelley toys with—the sense of epic nature that dwarfed a man. The conquistador (Balboa, of course, not Cortez) would have just emerged after a long trek through the thick malarial jungle of the Isthmus. (A similar figure stands upon a mountaintop in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog [1817].) The fragment the hunter discovers, along his jungly Thames, induces a similar sense of wonder before a majesty previously unknown.

Shelley’s poem is a masterpiece, Smith’s merely a curiosity. Though Shelley has managed his effects with greater tactical skill—not just the movement of detail but of emotion behind detail—we must not ignore that Smith, at least this once, was no mean poet. His vision is horrifically bleak. How disquieting it must have been, for this stockbroker in London and of London, to think of that distant day when his own civilized home would be rank wilderness. Disquieting, or perhaps thrilling.

CODA

We know nearly the hour these poems were written, but what was the source that so inflamed the imaginations of Shelley and Smith? The question has been as popular with scholars as the source of the Nile was once to explorers. According to the biographer Richard Holmes, the poets had been to the British Museum and seen the massive granite bust of Rameses II; but this can’t be true, as that sculpture, called the Younger Memnon, was not exhibited until 1820.30

One possible influence, perhaps insufficiently recognized, may have been Coleridge’s “dramatic fragment” “The Night-Scene,” which ends,

The whirl-blast comes, the desert-sands rise up

And shape themselves: from earth to heaven they stand,

As thought they were the pillars of a temple,

Built by Omnipotence in its own honour!

But the blast pauses, and their shaping spirit

Is fled: the mighty columns were but sand,

And lazy snakes trail o’er the level ruins!31

Here writ small are the desert sands, the majestic ruins (made of sand), the omnipotence that has built a monument to itself, the notion of vanity, and the colossal wreck of the colossal, leaving only Coleridge’s “level ruins” and Shelley’s “level sands.” Though an early draft had been composed in 1801, Coleridge did not collect this fragment until Sibylline Leaves, published in July 1817, six months before Shelley and Smith composed their poems. Shelley ordered the book in the month of publication.32 He was at the time particularly influenced by Coleridge.33

Shelley and Smith owed a debt to the universal history of Diodorus Siculus, whose Bibliotheca Historica was written about the time of Caesar.34 (Poets stand like beggars before a long line of ancient librarians.) Paraphrasing an even more ancient historian, Diodorus describes the monstrous statue, which then still possessed its legs and the hieroglyphic inscription. Usually spelled “Osymandyas” or “Osymandias,” the Greek name was an attempted transliteration of the inscription’s royal cartouche. In George Booth’s translation of 1814, the place Shelley probably came across Diodorus (that Shelley knew Greek does not mean he found it in Greek), the inscription reads: “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.”35 This is telling on two counts. First, Ozymandias says that no one can judge his greatness except the man who has surpassed him. Second, only such a man can know where the king is buried—it’s a riddle; but perhaps the burden is, “If you’re clever enough to overshadow me, you’re clever enough to find my tomb.”

It will be no comfort to those who believe that inspiration must be immediate and direct to know that, in all likelihood, Shelley took his ideas, not from secondhand sources, but thirdhand at best, specifically from a review in the Quarterly Review of a travel book by the aptly named Thomas Legh.36 (That in “Ozymandias” the tale is the secondhand account of a traveler is therefore fitting.) Lead piece in the October 1816 issue and therefore one a reader might leaf through offhandedly, the anonymous review includes all the salient details used by the two poets, not least a description of the giant fallen statue of Rameses II—a description bound to fire the fancy of a distracted poet or two. Indeed, so much so that fancy soon replaced fact. The statue, which intact would have stood some seventy feet high, had been well known in the classical period, having been set at the back of the first court of the pharaoh’s great funeral temple at Thebes, the Ramesseum, which lay across the Nile from Luxor. The statue was not standing but enthroned—not an orphan, not a lone figure abandoned amid empty sands.

Discussion of the statue and Shelley’s sources is complicated by occasional confusion about the various statues in the area. In desert emptiness about half a mile south of the Ramesseum stand the twin statues of the earlier pharaoh Amenhotep III called the Colossi (sometimes simply Colossus) of Memnon. At the Ramesseum, apart from the colossal head and upper body of the great statue of Rameses, sit the legs and base of the shorter statue of the enthroned pharaoh whose head was taken to the British Museum. This survivor of what was once a pair flanking the entrance to the temple is called, misleadingly, the Younger Memnon. The other head sits on the sand at the temple.

There is evidence that Shelley may have seen illustrations of the Colossus of Memnon in Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East and Other Countries, illustrations that also show the head and legs of the Younger Memnon. Pococke mistakenly believed a temple he saw at Luxor answered the description in Diodorus of the “sepulchre of Osymanduas.”37 Shelley may also have read the description of the Osymandyas statue by Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon, in a translation of Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypt (1802), which contains a number of phrases that beckon toward the poem (my emphases below):

At some paces from this gate are the remains of an enormous colossus; it has been wantonly shattered.… Is it the statue of … Osymandyas? … Osymandyas had … caused an inscription to be engraven on the pedestal of the statue, in which he defied the power of man to destroy this monument.… [The statue] has disappeared, the hand of time and the teeth of envy appear to have united zealously in its destruction, and nothing of it remains but a shapeless rock of granite.38

Since Smith and Shelley had many of the same fancies, and since both used the same spelling of Ozymandias,39 either their conversation settled on detail after reading the review or they had read some source now forgotten. The translation of Diodorus quoted in the Quarterly Review began, “I am the king of kings, Osymandyas”—the inversion may be a clue that the poets did not use only the review but had seen, say, George Booth’s translation of Diodorus. We know nothing about the form the competition or challenge took; but Shelley and Smith could not have been writing to the clock, because Shelley had drafted notes, as mentioned, now on the reverse of his fair copy of the poem. Rather, the poem may have taken a day or so, since Smith stayed only two days with Shelley after Christmas, and by early January Shelley’s poem was in Leigh Hunt’s hands. It’s possible that Smith was still revising his own piece when Shelley’s was published.

“Ozymandias” is not just about hubris; it’s a tale of mortality. Poets long to be immortal, as immortal as gods—that is the point, the more so if the poet is an atheist. (Shelley was inspired by such objects even while despising those who had erected them.) If even the monuments of the great conquerors can vanish in a few millennia, however, what shall remain of those whose names are writ in water? As Keats put it, when speaking to the Grecian urn, “When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours.”40 That, at best, is the fate of poetry. E. M. W. Tillyard put the case more dryly: beholding the annihilation of the works of Ozymandias, he proposed, any conqueror would despair.41 That was not the despair Ozymandias had in mind.

The very destruction or mutilation of artifacts makes them mutely eloquent (as we know from the recent brutal and senseless razing of monuments at Palmyra), especially when the past has been wrenched from its own country. The artifacts of empire were often orphans of war. Having conquered Egypt, Napoleon dispatched more than a hundred scholars and scientists to examine the wreckage of unnamed dynasties; when his fleet was defeated at the Battle of the Nile, his booty became the booty of England. This included the Rosetta Stone, which King George presented the British Museum in 1802. The Napoleonic army’s work of scholarship, Description de l’Egypte, appeared in twenty volumes between 1809 and 1826.

The Parthenon marbles were transferred to the museum piecemeal, though the government showed no interest in the Earl of Elgin’s rubble until after the rubble arrived. Would the Elgin Marbles, which Keats visited obsessively and Shelley at least on occasion (for some weeks in 1818, shortly after “Ozymandias” was published, he lived down the street from the museum),42 have provoked half so many poems if the frieze had been left decaying upon the shattered temple atop the Acropolis? Not every poet is a Shelley, able to squeeze genius from the pages of a review—most poets want more access to the source of inspiration. Poetry is not, even so, an adequate excuse for pillage.

Perhaps, deep beneath the conscious play of mortality here, lies something unconscious: the idea that a king, in the body of the poem, has been reanimated from his amputated parts. Those limbs are the limbs of Osiris, surely; but they are also the limbs imagined by Shelley’s young lover in Frankenstein more than a year before:

I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.… Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.43

A mummy! There is the center of the horror, the idea that even the ancient dead could return to life. Just as Byron may take credit for the vampires in our literature, Mary Shelley might be responsible for the reanimated mummies rife in Hollywood for most of a century.44

The deformed and mutilated head provides the link between Ozymandias and Frankenstein’s monster, but the creature realizes as soon as he sees himself that he is a monster. Ozymandias’s statue perhaps did not provide such enlightenment. We don’t know how Frankenstein fashioned his brute—Mary Shelley is economical there, either through a delicacy at mentioning body-snatching (limbs not of Osiris but of the graveyard) or through a sense that the monster could have been created out of inanimate clay, for instance. That radical notion might have appealed to her atheist lover.

Shelley’s work is a kind of reanimation, too—after millennia, the dead king speaks. The poem is neatly couched as two addresses: the traveler to the poet, and Ozymandias to anyone who passes. (It’s hard to pin down the tone of the former—dumbstruck? overbearing? boastful?—but the arrogance of the latter is beyond mistake and not meant to be mistaken.) No wonder Shelley despised tyrants—they are the acknowledged legislators of the world. When Shelley said in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821) that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,”45 it was at best a smiling untruth, just as false in Shelley’s day as in ours. (Had Byron remained in England, he might eventually have possessed great influence in the House of Lords. No English poet so important came so close to legislation.) That doesn’t mean poets are nothing; but to suggest they’re more than they are is a mild act of hubris, if also of romance. Should there ever be a colossal monument to Shelley, that sentence, not a line of his poetry, will no doubt be inscribed upon the base.

The poem also overthrows convention’s mild tyrannies about how poems come to be written. “Ozymandias” was written in competition, like an assignment in a poetry workshop; and its source lay at three removes from any view of the statue. (Magazines like the Illustrated London News and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with their wealth of wood engravings, had yet to be founded.) There was the ancient historian Hecataeus; there was Diodorus who paraphrased him; then the anonymous review, perhaps lying about Shelley’s library, in which the details lay recorded; and at last Shelley and Smith. The poem, in other words, probably fell from a review that quoted a book that paraphrased another book. (Had the men seen the engravings in Pococke, they were of the wrong statue.) Poems written on commission, as Shakespeare’s first sonnets may have been, are not by nature less felt, less authentic products of imagination than poems demanded by God. You might say that “Ozymandias” is a model of Romantic inspiration—what was the ruined statue but a folly, one you didn’t have to pay masons to erect? Indeed, you didn’t even need to see it.

Here Shelley has borrowed Byron’s exoticism, his attraction to the tales of the Middle East in The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos. Shelley took his inspiration through reading, and it’s good to be reminded that from Chaucer forward the secret history of poetry has been a history of reading. It’s surprising how often post-Romantic poets look down their noses at poems derived from reading other poems—Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton would not have condescended to poems that found their debts in old texts, and neither would Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Reading was part of their living world.

The centuries long ago took their toll of the ponderous hulk of Ozymandias, his bust lying cracked into puzzle pieces, his hands and feet disarticulated nearby. He lies facedown, as if he had slipped on a patch of desert ice. His excavated temples lie in beautiful ruins, but it isn’t true that nothing beside remains. The mummy of Rameses II was discovered in 1881. A few decades ago, it was flown to France to kill the insects devouring him from within—that’s the real curse of the pharaohs.46 Like so much else, the mummy has found immortality under glass. You can see the king himself. He now lies safe in a museum.47