Abram: Hello, I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: Abram, would you care to share the announcement? Abram: Today is very exciting. Today, we're going to read and discuss one of the most famous poems we've probably ever read on this podcast, Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias". Joanne? Joanne: Ozymandias. I met a traveler 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.” Abram: It's a doozy. It's a good one. Joanne: Okay. But here's the thing. Do you know that not only did you recommend this poem, but also a student of mine wanted to hear us discuss this poem. And when I heard both of those requests, I felt a little sleepy. Abram: Can we back up to the fact that my request was not taken seriously, and only when a student said to you, we should also do this poem, you were like, oh fine, we'll do that one. Joanne: I capitulated, I know. I need to explore that. I probably should explore that problem. But here's the thing. Both times, I remembered myself as I was as a student in high school, reading this poem and being bored out of my mind and being like, “Oh God, we have to read this for an AP exam or something”. And just, okay. You know what it's like, this poem for me was like, remember if you ever take piano lessons and you're a teacher, you have to learn Fur Elise by Beethoven and it's like everybody plays it and it's so boring that you don't even hear it. Abram: Oh, it's not boring at all. It's amazing. Joanne: This poem is amazing. This poem is amazing. This is why I love this podcast because quite often we go back to older poems that are considered classic or canonical. And then I relearn them with a whole new set of eyes and it really energizes me. And that was true for this poem for sure. Abram: One of the reasons perhaps that your students mentioned it to you is that this poem has a long life. So of course it's written by Shelley. Shelley was born in 1792. He died in 1822. He was a quintessential romanticist, so you get the power of nature, the power of the individual, and so on. He was a lefty radical at the time. He was kicked out of Oxford. Joanne: Kind of a lefty radical. Abram: Yes he was kicked out of Oxford for publishing a tract about atheism, and in many ways as we'll discuss, this poem fits with his politics, anti-tyranny and so on and so forth, that the tyrant falls, there's nothing left of his kingdom and so on. But also as we will discuss, there are ways in which he's doing things that even he doesn't realize are problematic politically. But one of the long lives of this poem is that it's become the kind of poem that basically means the fall of empires, the fall of tyrants. And so you'll see it referenced all over the place, wherever we're talking about the end of an empire, the end of a tyrant. And one of the more famous and recent places where that's appeared is in Breaking Bad! They have an episode called “Ozymandias” and they actually use this poem in the trailer for the final season. Joanne: I was thinking of writing to Bryan Cranston and AMC to see if they'd let us use his reading of Ozymandias because it was in the trailer for the episode and of course he has that beautiful resonant gravelly voice. He does a beautiful read. And many TV critics have cited that as one of the best TV episodes in all of the history of television. But that's not the only place where this has become a pop culture citation. This has become a touchstone poem for understanding the vanity of empire building, how transient physical works are that cite an emperor's power, critiques of authoritarian regimes. It's a very powerful poem in that way. Abram: And if you've been with us from the very beginning, lo these many years, you will note that in episode five we talk about an amazing poem by the Harlem Renaissance poet, Claude McKay. It's a poem called “America”. It's a sonnet. And it riffs off Ozymandias, but it's talking about America itself as a sinking empire. One that's going to sink into the sands, much like this one. These references have gone on and on, and other poets picked them up as well. Joanne: It's really interesting to me how some of these very canonical poems keep taking on new valences as time goes on. And that's really a lot of fun to watch. Abram: Yeah, and we should get into the poem and talk about exactly what's going on in here and how it's working, but it's worth noting at the beginning that this poem itself arises out of a literary competition. So Shelley's friend, Horace Smith, was a banker, and the two of them heard about this statue, this piece of a statue of Ramses II that was acquired by the British Museum, and they both knew about this ancient Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, who had written that the largest statue in Egypt had the inscription, I am Ozymandias, which is another name for Ramses II. “I am Ozymandias, king of kings. If anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits”. And the two of them said, let's compete, let's write a poem on the basis of this fact, this ancient Greek text, this arrival of this statue to the British museum. Let's write a poem about it. And the other poem was also printed. It's not as good. Joanne: I know. And again, I don't know if this will make it into the podcast, but maybe could we just read it so that we have something to compare? Yeah, this is really great because if you read Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem out of context, like in the Norton Anthology of English Literature or if you just read it online somewhere, you're reading it out of that context. And you don't realize it was originally published in a literary magazine called The Examiner in 1818. And this other poem by Horace Smith was also published in that literary magazine. In context, here is a way in which you're seeing two responses to a similar thing in conversation with each other. So here is Horace Smith's Ozymandias. In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert 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. Ooh, so that's interesting. He's saying what if someday, there's an ancient traveler deep into the future who's standing on the ruins of what was once London. What will they say about this place? So that's a really interesting kind of political commentary that he's offering that's a little different from what Shelley offers, right? Abram: Yeah. The one thing I do like about that poem is it brings it home. It's not just some distant ancient empire. It's the same applies to us. What do we think we're really achieving here? So yeah, that part I like the gigantic leg. No, not so much. Joanne: I like the big leg energy though. Why not? It's good. You can have a big leg now and then. But again, this interest in fallenness in ruins, and of course, a real interest in ruins of all kinds, not just abroad, but in England itself. Keep in mind, there were ruins of abbeys all over England at this time. And people in England would use them as little destinations for their walks and so forth. And they would ruminate on the ruins of time and so forth. So I think that this is part and parcel of the moment in which it's written. Abram: Absolutely. All right. So let's get into the poem. “I met a traveler from an antique land who said,” so at the very beginning, we've got two people, we've got the poet and we've got this Traveler and how are they meeting? We don't know. They might be meeting in person, or he might be meeting the Traveler in the books that he's reading. In other words, this might be a direct reference to Diodorus Siculus. Who knows? And then, most of the poem, the next ten, eleven lines, are this Traveler's description. of a statue and the pedestal. So that's where most of the poem lies. It's just this one giant image, well told, and in that image we get two more characters. That is Ozymandias, the actual statue, and we get the sculptor who made the statue, who was so very good at his artistic work that he captured the very personality of Ozymandias. And that's the octet. This is a sonnet. That's the first eight lines. And then in the next six lines, we turn more to the pedestal and not to the statue, the face itself. So what do you see in here, Joanne? Joanne: You're blowing my mind. Let's just take a step back. This is one of the weirdest sonnets I have ever read. You have several voices here, as you say. And so the first one is the poet himself or poetic speaker, and then what you just read, whoever this traveler is describing “two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert”. What? Look what happens in line three. If we could just really get micro here for a minute. There's some ellipses, so whoever's speaking, this traveler, he says, “two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert” and then ellipses. Ellipses in line three of a poem. Is this traveler trailing off? Is the traveler lacking the language to describe what he saw? What a strange typographical choice, right? Abram: There's so much strange about this sonnet and the ellipses is one of them because one of the things that it actually accomplishes in a weird way is that even though that's the end of a sentence, it doesn't feel like the end of a sentence. It feels like the continuation of a thought. And so what that enables is that the first sentence and you're the one who always teaches me to look for sentences, the first sentence is 11 lines long. And, if you know anything about sentence and sentence length, long sentences are for complicated thoughts. Short sentences are for power. You want to punctuate long sentences with short sentences. And that's exactly what Shelley does here. So after 11 lines of a sentence, the next sentence is three words. “Nothing beside remains”. And so part of the power of the ellipses is to create the sense of a long and complicated description which is then going to be punctured by a very short sentence. Joanne: Okay, this is helpful what you just said because now I'm envisioning the dramatic situation of this sonnet. The poetic speaker is having this encounter with whoever this traveler is from an antique land. And the traveler is trying to get us to see, he's trying to tell a description of Ramses II and he's caught without words. And then, as you say, way down in the poem, further down, “nothing beside remains”, maybe that nothingness is precisely what catches this traveler. off guard, right? The sense of desertion, the sense of utter annihilation, right? And then he captures, he recovers himself and then says, “near them on the sand, have sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.” Now here's what it says about art and artifice, whose cold command “tell that it sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive. Stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed”. Those are hard lines to understand. Can you parse what's happening there? Abram: One of the things Shelley turning to in this poem, and there are revisions that show that he's discovering this and amplifying this as he's writing this poem. But basically what he's doing is giving more and more power to the sculptor. As he's going through revisions of this poem, he's realizing the sculptor is in a certain sense, the hero of this poem, not Ozymandias, who's gone, whose empire is gone, whose statue has fallen, but instead the sculptor who was so well able to capture the personality in stone of this emperor, that it still survives. Joanne: That's really interesting. And it's interesting what's left, which is the frown, the wrinkled lip, the sneer of cold command, those qualities of personhood that give you a sense of the tyranny. Abram: Yeah. And a quick word about the revisions to this poem. The original said “lips inpatient of command”. That's not nearly as powerful as “sneer of cold command”. In “sneer of cold command,” you get the real sense of who this emperor was. And that's the same thing the sculptor is doing, right? The sculptor is trying to give you a real sense of who he was in the stone. And Shelley, in his own revisions, is trying, in a certain sense, to sculpt the personality with words. Joanne: And this is a tension that I think Shelley is picking up on from other poets who have come before him, right? So as I read this poem, I can't help but think of Shakespeare's Sonnet 55, right? Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme. And he refers to how marble will crumble, monuments will crumble, but this sonnet is going to live forever, or at least he hopes it will, but the object itself isn't enough. It's the text on the sculpture that really, I think, makes this poem ring. “And on the pedestal, these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’. Abram: There are earlier versions of this poem in which the saying on the pedestal comes first, as Shelley moved it later in the poem, so that we move from image and visage and marble and rock and stone, to words and text. And the poet starts to move into the language itself. It's amazing, of course, right? Because the words are so belied by the scene. This is a crumbled statue in a barren desert. And yet he's saying, “look on my mighty works and despair”. Joanne: Yeah. And this is where this poem really got exciting for me because there's a really problematic rhetorical position that a lot of travel narratives take, especially with the emergence of the British empire. This notion that the place that is to be colonized is wide open and bare and just ready for the taking. And I feel that at the end of this poem, right? This sense that the Egypt of the early 1800s is just nothing beside remains. It was a once great civilization. It was an enormous empire of great achievements and monuments. And now it's boundless and bare. That is deeply problematic for me. What do you see when you read these last lines? Abram: Yeah, in a way, the poem almost accidentally undermines itself, because it's against tyrants, right? So this is written in 1818, it's right after the fall of Napoleon, there's a way in which he might be thinking about Napoleon when he writes this, and yet, it's also a kind of poem that advances or allows for the advance of British Empire into Egypt, because there's nothing there. It's boundless and bare. And here at the end of the poem, as you say, nothing remains. It's boundless and bare. It's ours for the taking. And lo and behold, what happens, except they actually do take the statue of Ramses II and move it to the British Museum. Joanne: And in fact, I was just there a few weeks ago. I was just there looking at Ramses II. So this is deeply problematic and I'm not trying to suggest that Shelley intended this. I think what Shelley was trying to go for was a really profound critique of empire building, but he is doing it at precisely the moment when England is at the height of its empire building and looking for a way into establishing power in Egypt. Abram: It's totally fascinating and I think that it makes the poem far more interesting than Shelley even knew when he wrote it. Joanne: Yeah, I think that's right. Abram: So there's one other thing I think worth noticing about what Shelley has done with the form of this sonnet to build his point into the very shape of what he's doing. A normal sonnet, as we've discussed a thousand times on this podcast, has an octet and a sestet. eight lines, six lines with a turn right around there. The eight lines have their own rhyme scheme. The six lines have their own rhyme scheme. What Shelley does is he interweaves those rhyme schemes so that the six lines are gradually replacing the eight lines. And I think that reflects the point of the poem itself, which is that the power of nature, the sand, time itself is taking down this empire and gradually replacing it, and he's built that into the very rhyme schemes of this sonnet. Joanne: Oh, that's another beauty, and we've talked about that so many times in this podcast. It's a great example of how poetic form is not merely ornamental. It contributes to the content of the poem. This is why Shelley made this choice. This is why poets make these choices, right? Abram: Absolutely. Joanne: So with all that we've learned about this magnificent poem, would you be willing to read it once more? Abram: Ozymandias. [poem] Joanne: Jeez, that's so good. Thank you for that reading. If you'd like to learn more about Percy Bysshe Shelley, you can visit our website. Abram: We hope that you like what you heard today. If you did, please subscribe and leave a review to let us know how we're doing. Joanne: Please be sure to follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram, and on our new YouTube channel. Abram: And on our new Substack. Ah, so many things! Joanne: Thank you everyone. Abram: Thank you.