Statue of Ramses II photo by Mujtaba Chohan via Wikimedia commons.

Continuing the thread I began in my last entry about the British Museum, here is a photo of a statue of Ramses II from one of the Museum’s main galleries. This particular statue is taken to be the inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias.” While a brief look at publication dates demonstrates conclusively that Shelley did not see the piece at the British Museum before writing the poem. “Ozymandius” made its debut in The Examiner in January of 1818 before the statue arrived in England. Still Shelley heard of the statue and its progress West, which was a tremendous undertaking at the time. BBC Radio 4’s series A History of the World in 100 Objects featured the statue as number 20 and contains a concise study of the monuments significance including discussion of Shelley, and the irony that this statue, which brought European attention to the impressive magnitude of Ancient Egypt, will forever be associated with the futility of human endeavor.

Many people know Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” A lesser known fact is that there is a second “Ozymandias,” this one written by Horace Smith. Smith was, along with Shelley, a member of Leigh Hunt’s literary circle. A poet, novelist, and skilled stockbroker, Smith managed Shelley’s finances. Both sonnets were written in friendly competition, the two poets agreeing on the mutual subject, the reports of the statue of Ramses II.

Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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”

Shelley’s poem has become iconic, certainly eclipsing Smith’s effort. Still, Smith’s work is worth a read:

Ozymandias (later re-titled “On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below”)
By Horace Smith

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart 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.

Smith’s poem is interesting, even if it lacks the eloquence of Shelley’s more restrained work. This second poem brings the subject directly forward to Smith’s present, the capital of a burgeoning Empire, London. While Shelley’s poem implies the possibility of Western Civilization collapsing into the sands of time (the use of the phrase “King of Kings” does double duty referring to the rulers of the Ancient world and also implying Christ, the King of Kings most of their contemporaries would be acquainted with) Smith’s work is more explicit. It is a great image, one which finds a contemporary echo in unexpected places. In this version of the poem, civilization has been overtaken by the natural world, and an earlier mode of existence has taken hold as a hunter pursues a wolf through what was once London. This is a particular interesting invocation, as wolves have been extinct in Britain since somewhere around the 16th century (possibly 17th century in Scotland.) It also finds an echo in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s meditation on a situation in the British Museum, “The Burden of Nineveh,” a poem I’ll be looking at in a later blog entry.