Stanzas on Stones

On Boxing Day 1817, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary welcomed Horace Smith to their house at West Street in Marlowe, Buckinghamshire, where he was to be their house guest for several days. Smith was not only a friend of Shelley, but helped to manage the poet’s financial affairs. As part of their entertainment over the holiday period, the two men engaged in a poetry competition, in which each had to write a sonnet on a chosen subject within a fifteen minute time limit. (A sort of poetic equivalent of speed chess.) The relatively short fourteen line sonnet form was ideal for this.

Each of the resulting poems quoted at their beginning, in almost identical form, a passage from the writings of the classical Roman author Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily), which can be taken as their inspiration. The passage was one in which Diodorus described a colossal statue of Ramses II at Thebes, and particularly the inscription on it¹

‘I am Osymandyas, king of kings; if any would know how great I am, and where I lie, let him excel me in any of my works.’

(The name, usually spelt as Ozymandias, is generally believed to be a Greek form of the throne name of Ramses II, ‘User-Maat-Re-Setep-en-Re’.) We know that Shelley had a Latin edition of Diodorus’ forty volume Bibliotheca historica (Historical Library), which he had purchased in 1812, and an English translation by George Booth was published in London in 1814.

The Younger Memnon

The subject chosen for the poems was a topical one. Interest in Ancient Egypt had been fuelled by the arrival in London in 1802 of Egyptian antiquities including the Rosetta Stone, after the defeat of the French army which had invaded Egypt, and the publication of an English translation of Vivant Denon’s account of his travels in Egypt with the army, and the surviving monuments of Ancient Egypt which he had seen. Now, the arrival of the so-called Younger Memnon in London was imminent. This was the name given to the upper half of a colossal statue of Ramses II from his mortuary temple on the West Bank in Thebes. Known today as the Ramesseum, a name given to it by Champollion, the temple ruins were previously known from the works of Strabo as the Memnonium. (Memnon, in Greek legend, was a king of Ethiopia who fought in the Trojan War.) The colossal statues of Amenophis III at the entrance to his mortuary temple were known as the Colossi of Memnon, and the fallen statue of Ramses II was therefore dubbed ‘The Younger Memnon’. Napoleon’s expedition had tried, and failed, to move it, but on the suggestion of the Swiss traveller Johann Burckhardt the British Consul-General in Egypt, Henry Salt, had commissioned the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni to transport it to England. The statue was not installed in the British Museum until the spring of 1818², but its arrival in London would have been anticipated at the turn of 1817. In 1809, in his Aegyptiaca, the antiquary and diplomat William Hamilton had described it as “certainly the most beautiful and perfect piece of Egyptian sculpture that can be seen throughout the whole country”.

The Lover and the Leg

Both poems were published in The Examiner soon after they were written. Shelley’s appeared first, on 11^th January 1818, under the pen name ‘Glirastes’. (Translating as ‘Dormouse Lover’, this was a private joke, based on his pet name for Mary Shelley, ‘Dormouse’.) Smith’s was published a month later, on 1^st February, under the initials ‘H.S.’. The Examiner had been founded ten years earlier by John Hunt as a liberal political counterpart to more conservative journals and was edited by his brother Leigh, who knew Shelley well, and introduced him to his fellow poet John Keats. Both poems were also republished, Shelley’s in 1819, in his collection Rosalind and Helen, Smith’s in 1821 in his Amarynthus. Shelley kept the title Ozymandias. Smith renamed his sonnet On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below. It is hardly surprising, given this, that of the two poems it is Shelley’s that is best known nowadays. To be fair to Smith, his retitling of his poem may have had an element of irony in it. He and his brother James had come to fame with their Rejected Addresses, parodies of the leading poets of the day, and if his version of Ozymandias lacks Shelley’s technical sophistication, its theme and tone are still similar. Leaving aside the relative literary merits of the two poems, however, they are interesting for what they suggest about the way in which Ancient Egypt was perceived at this time.

The Wilderness where London stood

Champollion’s final decipherment of hieroglyphs was still several years away, and Classical sources of information on Ancient Egypt, such as Diodorus and Strabo were still of paramount importance. Both poets used the archaic spelling ‘desart’ for ‘desert’ in their poems (although it is normally modernised now in Shelley’s), which reflected the use of these sources and reminded nineteenth century readers that even to such Classical authors Egypt was already ancient. In both poems the statue serves to emphasise the transient nature of temporal power, even for rulers as mighty as the Pharaohs of Egypt, and in Smith’s case he speculated that his own civilisation might suffer the same fate as that of the Pharaohs. The choice of topic for the sonnet competition reflected the keen contemporary interest in Egyptian antiquities, as well as the debate over the rival artistic merits of Greek and Egyptian sculpture, and by extension the respective cultures that produced them. Shelley was soon to leave England, and never returned, but before he did he went on to write a sonnet to the Nile, again as part of a sonnet competition, this time with John Keats and Leigh Hunt, and Smith was later to write two other poems on Egyptian antiquities, Address to the Mummy at Belzoni’s Exhibition and To the Alabaster Sarcophagus, the latter referring to the sarcophagus of Sety I, initially deposited in the British Museum, but now in Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Even today, the image of the ruined colossus of Ozymandias still retains its power, and gave its name to an episode of the crime drama Breaking Bad, where the poem was recited in its entirety. Perhaps the last words should belong to Smith and Shelley, however.

Ozymandias
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.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias
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.
Horace Smith

1. See British Library web site ‘An Introduction to Ozymandias‘ ↩︎
2. James, The British Museum and Ancient Egypt p. 10 ↩︎