Commit Poetry: Ozymandias, Breaking Bad, and a Duck

I read a Facebook post on January 11 of this year announcing that it was the 200th anniversary of the day The Examiner published Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias.”

Ozzy who?

I had to look up the pronunciation. Several folks say Ah-zee-mahn-dee-us. Others say Ah-zee-man-dee-us. But some say to fit the meter of the sonnet, the name should be scrunched into four syllables—something like Ah-zee-man (or mahn)-jis.

I’ll bet you thought I knew what a sonnet was, right? I can never remember, so I had to look that up, too. Count the lines (14). Count the syllables (10). Notice the rhyme scheme (abab). Check out the infographic.

Come back to Ozzy. I read the poem through a couple of times and then set off to follow not a few bunny trails. One blogger wrote that the poem “is so famous that it really needs no introduction.” If that’s the case, how come the first I heard of it was maybe six months ago when my life coach included it on a list of poems she thought I should tuck into my heart? Did I fall asleep during high school English? Did my college friends memorize it while I was memorizing the 12 cranial nerves in nursing school?

Continued over at Tweetspeak Poetry…

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

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