As Poetry Daily’s Poets Picks email today features a rather odd little discussion of Shelley’s classic sonnet Ozymandias, I thought I’d dig out the other one and have a look at it again.
Becaiuse are these things just writ in stone, do they just come into being and that’s that? It’s all as natural as breathing, to borrow a phrase from Keats. But as it happens, Shelley’s poem was written in competition with his friend, the charmingly named Horace Smith. We all (well, those of us who memorised it as schoolchildren, which is probably quite a few) know it:
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…
(Near them, on the sand, maybe Wilson Keppel & Betty! Ach, old Oz should be so lucky.) It is a classic sonnet, a salutary sentiment on pride, and a great poem.
So here is Horace Smith’s effort:
On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.
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.
You have to feel for Horace… What chance did he ever have in life? Friend of Shelley? Apparently he even helped to “manage Shelley’s budget,” which probably means something like doing all the hard slog of budgeting and playing Bad Cop to the beautiful bardic boy, while he wafted about drinking sacks of butt and driving young girls to suicide… (I know: he was a very forward thinker in politics.) But you have to hand it to him, that is a CLASSIC title! And I do really think this final couplet is rather good. And I very much like “holding the Wolf in chace”.
But really.
By the nature of things we tend to associate The Past with poetry that is relatively (though I admit not always, pace Dryden etc) “good”, as it is the better stuff, which we keep wanting to read, that survives. But as this poem is both “from The Past” and – like most of ours – unsuccessful, but with good bits, I do think there is much that can be learned from it about what makes poems fail.
And we don’t have to worry about upsetting Horace Smith by using him as an example.
N.b., apparently the legs above are in Texas.
That’s an interesting comparison… okay, there’s no comparison… poor Horace. Hope he was no relation of mine!
This is great Katy. Never knew about Horace. The title is wonderful, and strikingly modern. I can just hear Baldrick reciting it, can’t you?
How fascinating! Thanks for this – I’d never seen that poem before.
But that link is spooky. Needs fixing if we are to enjoy the rather odd little discussion.
Never have geniuses as friends. Especially moody, needy geniuses.
Smith’s poem makes use of a trope highly popular at the time, the vestiges of the Empire visiting the ruins of London. It stems from the comparison to imperial Rome and the barbarians visiting the ruined city. There’s an extended discussion in Piers Brandon’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire.
A contribution to the lore of desert monuments:
The sexual life of a camel.
Is not quite what everyone thinks,
One night in an excess of passion,
He tried to make love to the Sphinx.
Now the Sphinx’s posterior regions
Are all clogged by the sands of the Nile,
Which accounts for the hump on the camel,
And the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile.
Miriam, thank you. You are an ornament.
And Richard, thanks for that bit of context. Certainly it is this trope of “this could happen to us, in fact WILL happen to us,” that is so effective in this poem. I hate to lower the tone – you know I do – but it also reminds me of The Planet of the Apes, of course.
By the way, Richard, you’ll be pleased to know I was given a belated birthday present the other day, the poems of Ernest Dowson, though not in red calf. It has made me very happy. But I’m not saying he’s Shelley.
Well-chosen photo BTW. Who took it? There’s neither a link nor a name.
Mark, it came off a blog with no name on it, which mentioned that people could download the pictures – which were mostly snapshots of a boring cat playing with another boring cat. It simply said that a millionaire had put this up for a joke. I think the blog belongs to a kid, and while I would definitely credit the kid if he’d given himself a name, there was no such name!m (It did give the name of the cat but I can’t remember it.)
Fair enough Katy, I was just curious (I’m always curious about photos). I allowed Wiki to use a couple of mine recently, which meant that I had to alter the copyright so that anyone could use them.
The pedant in me cannot be deterred: your readers might also be interested in Elizabeth Wanning Harries’s The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century, especially the essay entitled, “Fragmentary Ruins, Ruined Fragments.”
RHE