The OTHER Ozymandias

Tonehound
MemberFacehuggerMay 13, 2017Horace Smith's "Ozymandias"
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 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, published his sonnet a month after Percy Shelley's. It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes a similar moral point, but one related more directly to modernity, ending by imagining a hunter of the future looking in wonder on the ruins of an annihilated London. Shelley wrote the poem in competition with his friend Smith, as they would regularly do.
Interesting. All re. Rameses II
Shelley + Smith > David + Walter …