Not that it takes anything away really but Ozymandias is just the Greek name for Ramesses II, known to this day as the greatest Egyptian Pharoah. Nobody ever did surpass him.
Oh snap, I always thought Ozymandias was fictional. Thanks for the info!
Brian Cranston reading of this poem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sum6A2enC6s
It was made for marketing Breaking Bad, butt is still amazing
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,— Naught 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.
— Horace Smith, "Ozymandias"
I understand why Shelley's take is the one more acclaimed,
but I prefer Horace Smith and for that I am not ashamed.
A community to link to or copy and paste poems. It is not complicated.
Formatting help: two blank spaces at the end of a line will show you the path in the edit window
most certainly learning the Unicode markdown labels for spacing
nbsp
ensp
emsp
and how to activate them for your or someone else's poetry.
if a poem's language settings make it at all difficult to mod i'm deleting it.