About an hour ago, while I was playing my lunch gig, a friend of mine emailed me: ” I never knew two poets wrote identical poems in a friendly competition.” The poems, and the competition to which he refers, were inspired by a passage in a Greek history book. The better-known of the two is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, but the competing poem, written by Horace Smith and given the same name, is also not without merit.
With a lazy afternoon ahead of me, I thought I’d give the competition a long-past-due third entry.
So here’s 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.”
Here’s Smith:
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.
I have to admit that I really dig Smith’s suggestion that modern society is no more permanent that the reign of Ramsesses II, known to the Greeks as “Ozymandias”. So my take is more Smith and less Shelley:
Twinned and twain under the pitiless sun
Of Egypt’s desert stand two legs of stone
And their evening shadows merge into one.
Before them, a tablet states “It is known
That OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings, hath
Built this city that stands before your eyes.
The mighty knelt and trembled ‘fore his wrath.
Exceed him, then you may know where he lies.”
But for this tableau, there is naught but sand
Stretching to the horizon all around.
No sign of disturbance from foot or hand
The sirocco’s cry is the only sound.Will our wonder be shared by the one who
Follows a deserted shoreline until
He sees the bay flow to the ocean blue —
Across it, two encrusted sentinels
Collapsed and bereft of the bridge between
Them, rested and rusting the years away?
What were they? What could they possibly mean?
Did men raise them, or was it gods at play?
Be not deceived: that forlorn pharaoh’s fate
Awaits, too, New York and the Golden Gate.
Any other takers?
With apologies to everyone:
There once was a king named Ozymandias
Who built a desert city most grandest
But then some stuff went down
He turned into a clown
And all that’s left is the sandiest
First prize
Thanks!
Is it too late to swap “dandiest” for “grandest”? I think it works better….
Fragmented fingerprints of stone outlast
The desert’s inexhaustible Faber-Castell.
Clues from a mighty man once firmly cast
As the Pharoh of Egypt. “What is that?”
A boy asks his Dad. “An empire fallen fast.”
“How?” “Look around, son, don’t you see?”
“Be quiet, now, and salute Chairman Xie.”
King Ramses Great
Drove a Volkswagen sports car
Which is all that’s left
/with apologies to Smith, David’s Triumph, and everyone unfortunate enough to read this
I don’t do poetry, but I do recommend Robert Nathan’s 1960 book, The Weans.
“A delightful social satire about archeologists from a future Africa who unearth remnants of an extinct, unknown people they call the “US.”
Sometime around 7856, an archeological dig uncovers an ancient, unknown people. Parts of a large statue, a goddess or giantess are found. The discovery team thinks it was called “Libby.” An ancient coin is unearthed with the faint inscription “In God we…” The team of excavators wonders if they only prayed to one god? In another location, a fascinating discovery is made. An ancient tribe named the “dodgers,” apparently vanished from the East Coast while attempting to set up a “home base” or “pennant” in the West. Another team finds a large, battered metal cylinder, etched in a mysterious sign: “Budweiser.” Through all the discoveries to come, the satiric and clever Robert Nathan makes us wonder what the future may think of its past.”
Sounds akin to Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.”
My favorite part was the discovery of the tiny room, whose sole door bore the fragment “pomder roo…”: knowing how often the letters ‘m’ and ‘n’ are mistaken for one another, it was declared to be a “ponder room” or a specialized place where all important thinking was performed.
an Aquilonian on the docks I spied
imbued by drink, from him I plied
the legend of Ozymandias
and the secret route to where he lies
to know this tale of woe, he cried
seek ye out until ye find
the mark of a King, a statue once so grand
reduced to rubble in the sand
two massive legs, from calves to toes
and a tablet laying half exposed
are all that’s left of Ozymandias
despite defeating all his foes
sweep aside what’s overhead
and the epitaph can still be read:
“sitting on the throne, with this ancient tome
my balls have petrified into stone
the winds of time have scourged the land
and propped my prostate full of sand”
for twas not in proud defiance, the legs stood in twain
but squatting on the shitter, in eternal strain!
You know, now that I’m in my forties I really sympathize with ol’ Ozzy there!
ha!
well Ozzy Osbourne shitting on that statue & getting arrested was the impetus for the whole thing
hmm…I guess that should be
“and the secret route to where he lays” ?
but it doesn’t rhyme as well. or maybe it does depending how you pronounce it?
O frettled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me…
We have a lot of Vogon poets in this business.
Granted, I’m no Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings.
+1 on the Vogons
ps I liked how you snuck a car reference in there….Sirroco/Scirroco
I never realized how many Poets we had here =8-) .
.
-Nate