Friday, May 29, 2009

Poetry Friday

It's Poetry Friday and I'm moving away from nonsense poems for a week and giving you one of my favorite serious poems. It's short I promise. It fits so perfectly with my ideas about immortality/leaving a legacy.

This is Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe 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".

No comments: