Some pages on, however, and much deeper into Egypt, a Mr Banks had discovered an even bigger statue buried up to its shoulders in sand. This related that despite the proud words (which it repeated) on the colossal statue, no trace, save perhaps one “prostrate fragment”, now remained. Shelley was probably also influenced, therefore, by an account of Thomas Legh’s “Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the Cataracts” in the Quarterly Review for October 1816. Diodorus, who had never seen it, straightforwardly called it “Ozymandias”, recorded the proclamation on the pedestal and said that this funerary temple “seems to exceed all others not only in the vast scale of its expense, but also in the genius of its builders.” It was not, however, ruined: the black stone contained “not a crack, not a flaw” in his day. It was, said Hecataeus, the largest statue in Egypt its foot alone was “more than seven cubits”, or ten and a half feet long. Diodorus, writing in the first century BC, relayed Hecataeus’s description of the black-stone statue when it was standing complete in its temple in Thebes 300 years before. The most likely was Diodorus Siculus in his “Library of History”, which Shelley was reading around that time. Much ink has been spilled discussing exactly where Shelley’s image, and the vaunting proclamation, came from, but possible sources were not far to seek. But oddly, on the recto of the page (Shelley having typically started off on the verso), the whole thing is written out in fair copy, as if it has effortlessly formed in his head. Then he attributed a “gathered frown” to one of the legs. A “sultry mist” crept in, distracting him for a while. Then he was bothered by the material the trunkless legs were made of (“marble/grey/brown”). He got hung up first on “pedestal”, a tricky word to fit into a metre (“There stands by Nile a lone single pedestal”). In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg… Indeed, though his effort got better towards the end, it was hard to get straight-faced past the first two lines: The topic was “The Nile” the two poets dashed off theirs in style, while Hunt laboured on his until two in the morning.) Shelley’s poem and Smith’s were published in short succession in the Examiner the next year, Smith modestly regretting their proximity. (The next February Hunt set one up between Shelley, John Keats and himself. A mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, the young editor of the radical Examiner magazine, liked to organise sonnet competitions 15 minutes was the standard time allowed. The origins of “Ozymandias” were humble: a playful contest with a friend, Horace Smith, a jolly London poet-stockbroker, who was staying with Shelley at Marlow. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”. 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 lips, 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. He would also, perhaps, have been surprised. Shelley would probably have been mildly miffed by its success he was much more keen to fire up the public with his longer works. The sonnet that grew out of it was included in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in 1861 and, since then, has made most anthologies of English verse. This has become, perhaps, the most famous line in Shelley, though it was not his own the one everyone knows and bursts into unprompted, though they may barely have heard of the poet himself. Across the top of the page run the words: My name is Ozymandias-King of Kings It took up one page of the same notebook: a page previously, or subsequently, covered with elementary sums and blots. He had spent most of the year doing the same, often floating round in a small skiff on the Thames or perched in Bisham wood, near Marlow, to bring to birth his enormous mythical-French-revolution poem, “The Revolt of Islam”. JUST after Christmas in 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley, then 25, sat down to write a poem.
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