Full text
Ozymandias
Project Gutenberg #4800: The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford, 1914)
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Source: Project Gutenberg #4800: The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford, 1914) Source URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4800 Public domain basis: First published in The Examiner, 11 January 1818; public domain. Coverage: Complete: the fourteen-line sonnet (line numbers removed).
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.