JUST after Christmas in 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley, then 25, sat down to write a poem. This was not, of course, unusual. He had spent most of the year doing the same, often floating round in a small skiff on the Thames or perched in Bisham wood, near Marlow, to bring to birth his enormous mythical-French-revolution poem, “The Revolt of Islam”. By contrast, this one was a doddle. It took up one page of the same notebook: a page previously, or subsequently, covered with elementary sums and blots. Across the top of the page run the words:
My name is Ozymandias—King of Kings
In this section
Buried like kings
Midnight in Nowheresville
In the trenches of a language war
Bleak chic
In a dark wood
There’s gold in them there wells
Dr Warne and the cockroaches
The road to the top
Curse of the mummyji
The fall guy
Be my guest
Among the lettuce-smugglers
The red carpet
Reel estate
The fight over the Doves
King of Kings
Reprints
Related topics
London
Arts, entertainment and media
Media
Poetry
Egypt
This has become, perhaps, the most famous line in Shelley, though it was not his own; the one everyone knows and bursts into unprompted, though they may barely have heard of the poet himself. The sonnet that grew out of it was included in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in 1861 and, since then, has made most anthologies of English verse. It is, by general consent, a great poem. Shelley would probably have been mildly miffed by its success; he was much more keen to fire up the public with his longer works. He would also, perhaps, have been surprised.
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 shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lips, 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!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”—
The origins of “Ozymandias” were humble: a playful contest with a friend, Horace Smith, a jolly London poet-stockbroker, who was staying with Shelley at Marlow. A mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, the young editor of the radical Examiner magazine, liked to organise sonnet competitions; 15 minutes was the standard time allowed. (The next February Hunt set one up between Shelley, John Keats and himself. The topic was “The Nile”; the two poets dashed off theirs in style, while Hunt laboured on his until two in the morning.) Shelley’s poem and Smith’s were published in short succession in the Examiner the next year, Smith modestly regretting their proximity. Indeed, though his effort got better towards the end, it was hard to get straight-faced past the first two lines:
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg…
The Muse had plainly dawdled. Shelley’s start was rocky, too. He got hung up first on “pedestal”, a tricky word to fit into a metre (“There stands by Nile a lone single pedestal”). Then he was bothered by the material the trunkless legs were made of (“marble/grey/brown”). A “sultry mist” crept in, distracting him for a while. Then he attributed a “gathered frown” to one of the legs. But oddly, on the recto of the page (Shelley having typically started off on the verso), the whole thing is written out in fair copy, as if it has effortlessly formed in his head.
Probably it had. Much ink has been spilled discussing exactly where Shelley’s image, and the vaunting proclamation, came from, but possible sources were not far to seek. The most likely was Diodorus Siculus in his “Library of History”, which Shelley was reading around that time. Diodorus, writing in the first century BC, relayed Hecataeus’s description of the black-stone statue when it was standing complete in its temple in Thebes 300 years before. It was, said Hecataeus, the largest statue in Egypt; its foot alone was “more than seven cubits”, or ten and a half feet long. Diodorus, who had never seen it, straightforwardly called it “Ozymandias”, recorded the proclamation on the pedestal and said that this funerary temple “seems to exceed all others not only in the vast scale of its expense, but also in the genius of its builders.” It was not, however, ruined: the black stone contained “not a crack, not a flaw” in his day.
Shelley was probably also influenced, therefore, by an account of Thomas Legh’s “Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the Cataracts” in the Quarterly Review for October 1816. This related that despite the proud words (which it repeated) on the colossal statue, no trace, save perhaps one “prostrate fragment”, now remained. Some pages on, however, and much deeper into Egypt, a Mr Banks had discovered an even bigger statue buried up to its shoulders in sand. Standing upon the tip of its ear, he could just reach to the middle of its forehead, from which he calculated that the length of the head was 12 feet (3.7 metres), and the height of the whole thing probably 84 feet, “far exceeding that of the supposed statue of the ‘King of Kings’.”
The King of Kings, though, was the one visitors wanted to see, when they had braved the broiling heat and terrifying emptiness of the desert to get so far. Several 18th-century travel books, such as Pococke’s “Description of the East” (1743) and Vivant Denon’s “Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte” (1802), contained engravings of a toppled and scattered colossus in Thebes that might have been Ozymandias. Denon, with his French sniffiness, pronounced the style of the statue “mediocre” but the execution perfect. He also noted that because the coiffure was broken, it was impossible to tell whether the subject was a king or a god. But he had measured it: 25 feet across the shoulders, and 75 feet in height. The wonderful name had caught on; tourists from all over Europe, he noted, had carved their own names and remarks, in many languages, on what they supposed was left of him.
Shelley’s fallen tyrant departed from any of these. His legs stood upright, whereas the original statue was sitting, and the ruin was lying down. The ruin lay on its face, so there was no possibility of seeing those “wrinkled lips” and that “sneer of cold command”. Fallen buildings lay all round it, too, where Shelley’s poem had “nothing beside” the boundless desert sands.
But poets had their privilege, he once said coyly; they could imagine whatever they liked. This seems to be what he had done, from an imagination peopled with sneering tyrants ever since he was a boy. The “vast and trunkless legs” could as well belong to the famously corpulent Prince Regent, holding lavish banquets in Carlton House while the poor scraped and starved; the “sneer of cold command” would suit any of the raging, gorging, hell-hound-loosing rulers depicted in “Queen Mab”, Shelley’s radical and youthful outpouring of 1813. Shelley had sculpted Ozymandias’s face himself, shattered it with whoops of glee, rubbed it in its own pride (“king” always being an obscenity as far as he was concerned) and placed it in the wilderness, both moral and physical, in which such men belonged.
In any case, the “real” Ozymandias too was a stock tyrant; or so it seemed. No other writer of antiquity mentioned him. The stone reliefs Diodorus associated with him, and the buildings around him, appeared to be the mortuary-temple complex of Ramesses II, otherwise known as the Younger Memnon. “Ozymandias” may have been a corruption of part of his royal name. It was Ramesses II, ruler of Upper Egypt for 67 years in the 13th century BC, who had defeated the Hittites, the Nubians and the Canaanites, hugely expanded the bounds of Egypt, and built Thebes into a city of 100 gates, many covered in gold and silver. He revelled in colossal statues, erecting more than any other Egyptian king, and it was he who had declared, in words less rhythmical than Shelley made them, “Should any man seek to know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
As it happened, as Shelley and Smith were scribbling their competing sonnets, Ramesses II was on his way to London. The top half of one of the statues of him at Thebes (though not the one described by Diodorus, which still lies in situ toppled and mutilated) had been dragged, on trolleys and with palm-fibre ropes, as far as the bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, and now waited only for a boat to transport it the rest of the way. The boat would need to be substantial: the pharaoh’s head and shoulders weighed seven tonnes. The French army, passing nearby, had tried to shift the colossus by drilling a three-inch hole in his shoulder and stuffing it with dynamite, but the soldiers had chickened out at the last moment and left him behind.
It fell to Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman, weightlifter and engineer, to find a way to lever the colossal hulk out of the sand
The British, as they drove the French out of Egypt, also picked up their antiquarian loot. No consciences pricked about taking it. Glorious Thebes was now a “village”, populated by wretched lentil-eating peasants and “a dark and woolly-haired under-race” who had no notion what the statues meant. It fell to Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman, weightlifter and engineer, to find a way to lever the colossal hulk out of the sand with a workforce of “complete savages…entirely unacquainted with any kind of labour and ignorant of the value of money.”
In 1818 the Younger Memnon was enthroned in a newly built Egyptian Room at the British Museum, where he remains, magnificent in grey and pale brown granite, the French sappers’ hole still in his shoulder. The keeper of the Egyptian Room explained that he
JUST after Christmas in 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley, then 25, sat down to write a poem. This was not, of course, unusual. He had spent most of the year doing the same, often floating round in a small skiff on the Thames or perched in Bisham wood, near Marlow, to bring to birth his enormous mythical-French-revolution poem, “The Revolt of Islam”. By contrast, this one was a doddle. It took up one page of the same notebook: a page previously, or subsequently, covered with elementary sums and blots. Across the top of the page run the words:
My name is Ozymandias—King of Kings
In this section
Buried like kings
Midnight in Nowheresville
In the trenches of a language war
Bleak chic
In a dark wood
There’s gold in them there wells
Dr Warne and the cockroaches
The road to the top
Curse of the mummyji
The fall guy
Be my guest
Among the lettuce-smugglers
The red carpet
Reel estate
The fight over the Doves
King of Kings
Reprints
Related topics
London
Arts, entertainment and media
Media
Poetry
Egypt
This has become, perhaps, the most famous line in Shelley, though it was not his own; the one everyone knows and bursts into unprompted, though they may barely have heard of the poet himself. The sonnet that grew out of it was included in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in 1861 and, since then, has made most anthologies of English verse. It is, by general consent, a great poem. Shelley would probably have been mildly miffed by its success; he was much more keen to fire up the public with his longer works. He would also, perhaps, have been surprised.
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 shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lips, 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!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”—
The origins of “Ozymandias” were humble: a playful contest with a friend, Horace Smith, a jolly London poet-stockbroker, who was staying with Shelley at Marlow. A mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, the young editor of the radical Examiner magazine, liked to organise sonnet competitions; 15 minutes was the standard time allowed. (The next February Hunt set one up between Shelley, John Keats and himself. The topic was “The Nile”; the two poets dashed off theirs in style, while Hunt laboured on his until two in the morning.) Shelley’s poem and Smith’s were published in short succession in the Examiner the next year, Smith modestly regretting their proximity. Indeed, though his effort got better towards the end, it was hard to get straight-faced past the first two lines:
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg…
The Muse had plainly dawdled. Shelley’s start was rocky, too. He got hung up first on “pedestal”, a tricky word to fit into a metre (“There stands by Nile a lone single pedestal”). Then he was bothered by the material the trunkless legs were made of (“marble/grey/brown”). A “sultry mist” crept in, distracting him for a while. Then he attributed a “gathered frown” to one of the legs. But oddly, on the recto of the page (Shelley having typically started off on the verso), the whole thing is written out in fair copy, as if it has effortlessly formed in his head.
Probably it had. Much ink has been spilled discussing exactly where Shelley’s image, and the vaunting proclamation, came from, but possible sources were not far to seek. The most likely was Diodorus Siculus in his “Library of History”, which Shelley was reading around that time. Diodorus, writing in the first century BC, relayed Hecataeus’s description of the black-stone statue when it was standing complete in its temple in Thebes 300 years before. It was, said Hecataeus, the largest statue in Egypt; its foot alone was “more than seven cubits”, or ten and a half feet long. Diodorus, who had never seen it, straightforwardly called it “Ozymandias”, recorded the proclamation on the pedestal and said that this funerary temple “seems to exceed all others not only in the vast scale of its expense, but also in the genius of its builders.” It was not, however, ruined: the black stone contained “not a crack, not a flaw” in his day.
Shelley was probably also influenced, therefore, by an account of Thomas Legh’s “Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the Cataracts” in the Quarterly Review for October 1816. This related that despite the proud words (which it repeated) on the colossal statue, no trace, save perhaps one “prostrate fragment”, now remained. Some pages on, however, and much deeper into Egypt, a Mr Banks had discovered an even bigger statue buried up to its shoulders in sand. Standing upon the tip of its ear, he could just reach to the middle of its forehead, from which he calculated that the length of the head was 12 feet (3.7 metres), and the height of the whole thing probably 84 feet, “far exceeding that of the supposed statue of the ‘King of Kings’.”
The King of Kings, though, was the one visitors wanted to see, when they had braved the broiling heat and terrifying emptiness of the desert to get so far. Several 18th-century travel books, such as Pococke’s “Description of the East” (1743) and Vivant Denon’s “Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte” (1802), contained engravings of a toppled and scattered colossus in Thebes that might have been Ozymandias. Denon, with his French sniffiness, pronounced the style of the statue “mediocre” but the execution perfect. He also noted that because the coiffure was broken, it was impossible to tell whether the subject was a king or a god. But he had measured it: 25 feet across the shoulders, and 75 feet in height. The wonderful name had caught on; tourists from all over Europe, he noted, had carved their own names and remarks, in many languages, on what they supposed was left of him.
Shelley’s fallen tyrant departed from any of these. His legs stood upright, whereas the original statue was sitting, and the ruin was lying down. The ruin lay on its face, so there was no possibility of seeing those “wrinkled lips” and that “sneer of cold command”. Fallen buildings lay all round it, too, where Shelley’s poem had “nothing beside” the boundless desert sands.
But poets had their privilege, he once said coyly; they could imagine whatever they liked. This seems to be what he had done, from an imagination peopled with sneering tyrants ever since he was a boy. The “vast and trunkless legs” could as well belong to the famously corpulent Prince Regent, holding lavish banquets in Carlton House while the poor scraped and starved; the “sneer of cold command” would suit any of the raging, gorging, hell-hound-loosing rulers depicted in “Queen Mab”, Shelley’s radical and youthful outpouring of 1813. Shelley had sculpted Ozymandias’s face himself, shattered it with whoops of glee, rubbed it in its own pride (“king” always being an obscenity as far as he was concerned) and placed it in the wilderness, both moral and physical, in which such men belonged.
In any case, the “real” Ozymandias too was a stock tyrant; or so it seemed. No other writer of antiquity mentioned him. The stone reliefs Diodorus associated with him, and the buildings around him, appeared to be the mortuary-temple complex of Ramesses II, otherwise known as the Younger Memnon. “Ozymandias” may have been a corruption of part of his royal name. It was Ramesses II, ruler of Upper Egypt for 67 years in the 13th century BC, who had defeated the Hittites, the Nubians and the Canaanites, hugely expanded the bounds of Egypt, and built Thebes into a city of 100 gates, many covered in gold and silver. He revelled in colossal statues, erecting more than any other Egyptian king, and it was he who had declared, in words less rhythmical than Shelley made them, “Should any man seek to know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
As it happened, as Shelley and Smith were scribbling their competing sonnets, Ramesses II was on his way to London. The top half of one of the statues of him at Thebes (though not the one described by Diodorus, which still lies in situ toppled and mutilated) had been dragged, on trolleys and with palm-fibre ropes, as far as the bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, and now waited only for a boat to transport it the rest of the way. The boat would need to be substantial: the pharaoh’s head and shoulders weighed seven tonnes. The French army, passing nearby, had tried to shift the colossus by drilling a three-inch hole in his shoulder and stuffing it with dynamite, but the soldiers had chickened out at the last moment and left him behind.
It fell to Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman, weightlifter and engineer, to find a way to lever the colossal hulk out of the sand
The British, as they drove the French out of Egypt, also picked up their antiquarian loot. No consciences pricked about taking it. Glorious Thebes was now a “village”, populated by wretched lentil-eating peasants and “a dark and woolly-haired under-race” who had no notion what the statues meant. It fell to Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman, weightlifter and engineer, to find a way to lever the colossal hulk out of the sand with a workforce of “complete savages…entirely unacquainted with any kind of labour and ignorant of the value of money.”
In 1818 the Younger Memnon was enthroned in a newly built Egyptian Room at the British Museum, where he remains, magnificent in grey and pale brown granite, the French sappers’ hole still in his shoulder. The keeper of the Egyptian Room explained that he
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