Poem Ozymandias Quotes

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.

Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.

Incontrai un viandante di una terra dell'antichità, Che diceva: “Due enormi gambe di pietra stroncate Stanno imponenti nel deserto… Nella sabbia, non lungi di là, Mezzo viso sprofondato e sfranto, e la sua fronte, E le rugose labbra, e il sogghigno di fredda autorità, Tramandano che lo scultore di ben conoscere quelle passioni rivelava, Che ancor sopravvivono, stampate senza vita su queste pietre, Alla mano che le plasmava, e al sentimento che le alimentava: E sul piedistallo, queste parole cesellate: "Il mio nome è Ozymandias, re di tutti i re, Ammirate, Voi Potenti, la mia opera e disperate! Null'altro rimane. Intorno alle rovine Di quel rudere colossale, spoglie e sterminate, Le piatte sabbie solitarie si estendono oltre confine.