Ozymandias
Ozymandias was the greatest King of Really Ancient Egypt, the era before Ancient Egypt. He built a huge statue of himself in the middle of a great city, but after Ancient Antarctic Egypt was devoured by a genetically engineered psychic squid designed to simulate an alien invasion, he was entirely forgotten. He was rediscovered by Percy Shelley and his drug dealer Alan Moore during an acid trip, and successfully returned to a second career as the lead singer for heavy metal band Black Sabbath.
Who was Ozymandias?
Often referred to as "The king of everything", the mysterious Ozymandias ruled over Egypt. His works leave behind a legacy of despair known to millions of the mighty. These include massive monuments and a supposedly broken statue, which was Ozymandias who managed to enter into a hibernation state.
With the fall of his empire while sleeping , someone broke his statue. As far as it can be ascertained his feet are still in Egypt while his body is lost and his head in the the British Museum.
The Competition
Shelley and Smith went to a museum and saw the statue that had been moved from Egypt.They decided to give themselves a challenge. They both had to write a poem about what they had saw. They came up with the following:
Shelley's Poem
OZYMANDIAS of EGYPT
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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd 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
Smith's Poem
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: –
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." – The City's gone, –
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, – and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
--Horace Smith.
Anyway the result seems to have gone to Shelley, although both portray Ozymandias in a bad light. See how they show him in a downcast position. Sure he has lost his feet, and his body is lost and his head is in a museum, but does that give them the right to write such a poem? I don't think so. They should have written a poem saying how great he was, but now they are dead and they cannot.
Ozymandias, the future
Nobody knows what will happen to him should he wake up. Will he be dead as he cannot live as a disembodied head, or will he become someone like the floating head doctor like JD (played by Sam Taylor) from Scrubs? All this is speculation and should be of the utmost importance, especially as he needs to rebuild his kingdom. Romans, Persians, Christians, Muslims, Egyptians, Assyrians, Crusaders, Ottomans, British, and in some important cases Australians were not very good at keeping it all together and will need to be smitten, maybe by Ozymandias himself.
Factoids
- Ozymandias once created Egypt using only a paper clip and a water balloon, even though paperclips and rubber were unknown in Egypt.
- Ozymandias is the last boss in every video game ever created.
- Ozzy Osbourne was created by Ozymandias, but later deemed a mistake.