In the Dark

Since I posted an item about Shelley a couple of days ago I’ll use that as an excuse to post this famous poem by him.It’s a well-known piece, but not a lot of people know that it was actually written in 1817, as part of a sonnet-writing contest between Shelley and Horace Smith.

I wonder why it always makes me think of STFC?

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”.

This entry was posted on February 16, 2011 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Poetry with tags Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley, STFC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.