I have loved Poetry all my long life. It is impossible for me to name an all-time favourite – though Derek Walcott’s A LETTER FROM BROOKLYN would be a contender. However, there is a poem I consider would be on any list of perfect poems.
Politicians love to praise themselves or arrange for others to praise them. About 3,500 years ago the greatest of all Egyptian Pharaohs, Rameses II, obviously a politician to his fingertips, set up a huge statue to himself at Thebes. It weighed a thousand tons and the inscription on it read: “I am User-ma-ra, ruler of rulers, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, He of the Sedge and Bee, the mighty justice of Re, the chosen of Re. If a man wishes to know the greatness of me, here I lie, let him surpass what I have done.”
Six hundred years later a Greek explorer, Hekataios, visited Egypt and described this great statue, although the best he could do in deciphering the name User-ma-ra in Greek terms was Ozymandias.
Hekataios’s book is now lost but the great Roman historian, Diodorus, writing in the time of Augustus Caesar, used the description of the great statue in his 40 volume history of the world.
A couple of thousand years later, on December 27th, 1817, an English banker of literary bent called Horace Smith visited a young couple in their house in the small village of Marlow on the River Thames. The young lady had just sent to the printers the manuscript of a novel entitled Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. The three friends chatted together in the house’s pleasant library.
Horace Smith, the banker, had been reading the historian Diodorus and was impressed by the description of the huge, toppled statue that he had read about in the book. He discussed it with his young hosts and told them he had decided to write a sonnet on the subject. He sat down at the library table and eventually completed a sonnet which, to say the least, was not very good.
Before the banker had finished, his young host, Percy Bysshe Shelley, joined him at the table, looked at what he was writing, and decided that he also would write on the subject. He wrote quickly as follows:
There stands by Nile a single pedestal,
On which two trunkless legs of crumbling stone
Quiver thro sultry mist; beneath the sand
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lips impatient of command
Betray some sculptor’s art whose
Then he stopped and struck out the first line and the first word of the second line. Then, the manuscript shows, Shelley started afresh and quickly wrote a poem that is one of the small masterpieces of English poetry – a short, eloquent testimony that says all that needs to be said about the transitoriness and futility of all worldly pride and power. Read the finished poem.
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 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, 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.
It is fascinating to consider how that poem came to be written. In about twenty minutes Shelley wrote a great poem. But look how a Pharaoh, a Greek explorer, a Roman historian, and an English banker helped him write it. Genius is being prepared for the moment. The two men sent their sonnets off to a newspaper which printed both. Horace Smith called his “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.” Shelley just called his poem Ozymandias.
