Ozymandias

Today, I was going through some poems I used to love in the past. I would sit, read the words over and over, sometimes softly, sometimes loudly, sometimes quickly, and sometimes slowly. Then I would try to imagine what the writer had in mind; what message the poet was trying to pass across with such powerful words.

I want to share one short poem that has stirred such vivid imagery whenever I read it. This poem really gives me the goose bumps (from an appreciation of its ‘majesty’). I really wish I could write as powerfully as this poet. His name is Percy Bysshe Shelly.

Ozymandias

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.