PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) and HORACE SMITH These two poems were written in 1817, when Percy Shelley and Horace Smith were having a sonnet contest. Shelley's was published in The Examiner on 11 Janurary 1818, and Smith's on 1 February 1818. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY "Ozymandius" 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, the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandius, 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." HORACE SMITH "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! Naught but the leg remaining to disclose The sight of that forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some hunter may express Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase, He met some fragment huge, and stops to guess What wonderful, but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) England in 1819. An old, mad, blind, despis'd, and dying king, Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn--mud from a muddy spring, Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, A people starv'd and stabb'd in the untill'd field, An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edg'd sword to all who wield, Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay, Religion Christless, Godless--a book seal'd, A Senate--Time's worst statute unrepeal'd, Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.