202210141736 Ozymandias

I met a Traveller from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless logs 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!’
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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In the original edition, the word “Ozymandias” appears in small-caps.

<span style=“font-variant: small-caps”>Ozymandias</span>

The poem was signed and published under the pseudonym “Glirastes” which is a portmanteau combining the Greek suffix erastes, meaning “lover of,” and the Latin Gliridae, the scientific term for the family of the dormouse. Mary Shelley’s wife playfully called herself “a dormouse” in many letters to Percy, so this was his way of signaling his affection for her as “a lover of the dormouse”