On Jul 25, 2006, at 4:23 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote:
...and Despair. (Shelly)
The above quote is from Shelly's poem Ozymandus:
I met a traveler from and antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered vissage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt 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."
Forgive an old English major a moment with one of my favorite works...
For all the years I've known and loved this poem, I never knew until
recently what I got from the Wikipedia entry on it: that the word
"survive" in the seventh line, goes with "the hand that mock'd
them and the heart that fed" ("mock'd" is used in the sense of a
"mock-up", or a copy).
The words, "stamp'd on these lifeless things", are an aside. The line
says that the sculptor well read the passions that have survived both
the hand of the sculptor which captured them and the heart of the
ruler that fed them. Damn, Shelly was good.
Shelly apparently wrote this poem in a kind of competition with poet
Horace Smith, whose poem covers the same "colossal wreck" with nothing
of Shelly's mystery and mastery. Smith's mundane little sonnet serves
to highlight the brilliance of Shelly's:
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 fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Dave
The Moving Finger Writes Maru
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