What Shelley got wrong in “Ozymandias”
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand.” — The City’s gone, —
If this sounds almost familiar, it’s because it’s from the poem “Ozymandias,” but not that “Ozymandias.” This version was written by Horace Smith as part of a competition with his friend Shelley to compose sonnets on a common theme, a passage from Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca historica. (These competitions were something of a thing for the Romantics: Percy’s wife Mary wrote the novel Frankenstein as part of a similar contest with Lord Byron while the Shelleys were staying with him on the shores of Lake Geneva during the dreary non-summer of 1816.)
Both Shelley’s and Smith’s poems describe a broken colossus crumbling in the desert above slightly different paraphrases of the inscription that Diodorus Siculus records as “King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.” Both poems are parables of the impermanence of worldly renown, and Shelley’s version, with its simple and mawkishly didactic lesson about pride and hubris, is still a staple of the high school English curriculum.
It’s supposed to be a timeless lesson, but it’s a false one. No matter how much Shelley and Smith try to convince us that the works of great men are ultimately in vain, their poems by their very existence belie their intent. The truth, inescapable, is that the works of Ozymandias, or Rameses II as he is better known to us, do endure, and not just in a well-known (and a less well-known) poem. They can be found from Luxor to Abu Simbel, and we still stand before them in awe. Look on his works ye mighty, or ye average Joe, and despair. Seriously, what have you done with your life?
I was reminded of Shelley’s poem last fall in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin as I read the mortuary epitaph of the neo-Hittite King Panamuwa I, written on a colossal statue of the Hittite storm-god Hadad. The long inscription begins, with echoes of Ozymandias:
I am Panamuwa, son of Qarli, king of Y’DY, who have erected this statue for Hadad in my eternal abode. The gods Hadad and El and Rašap and Rākib-El and Šamaš supported me. Hadad and El and Rākib-El and Šamaš and Rašap gave the scepter of dominion into my hands. Rašap supported me. So whatever I grasped with my hand […] and whatever I asked from the gods, they granted to me.
What struck me was not the tragic evanescence of fame, but just how wrong Shelley was. There I was, in the capital of a country whose power and wealth King Panamuwa could not have imagined, in a building built in the flush of patriotic pride by another king, Emperor Wilhelm II, and in front of me, on display to visitors from around the globe, was the statue King Panamuwa had erected so that he would be remembered. Three millennia later and three thousand miles away from where he died, people are still reading of his achievements and marvelling at his funeral monument. So much for the ephemeral and the mortal — that’s one heck of a legacy.
Shelley and Smith even altered their source material to make their points and still they couldn’t avoid the fact that they were writing of a long-dead pharaoh whom they knew by name. In Diodorus Siculus’s account, the statue is not “a colossal wreck” and there are no “vast and trunkless legs of stone” (or, as in Smith’s version, “a gigantic Leg”). Instead, Diodorus Siculus describes the figure as “seated … the largest of any in Egypt” and “marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone, since in a block of so great a size there is not a single crack or blemish to be seen.” The implication is clear: the greatness of Osymandyas is well-attested by his surviving monument. By contrast (and be honest), who today has heard of Horace Smith?
The fictional Ozymandias is a forgotten titan, but in reality Rameses II is probably the only pharaoh most people can name other than the comparatively inconsequential boy King Tutankhamen. Shelley may not have lived to see him portrayed in Technicolor by Yul Brynner, but even he knew enough to be excited about the arrival of one of his many surviving sculptures in London in 1818. It was a perverse poetic conceit to compose a meditation on historical anonymity based on such a famous figure.
Poets may be, as Shelley once boasted, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but the greatest of actual legislators are both acknowledged in their lifetimes and remembered long after. The best efforts of Romantic but wrong-headed poets can’t change that.
