Percy Shelly's Ozymandias

In a footnote of the Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume D: The Romantic Period, on page 768, we have this statement: "According to Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian of the 1st century B.C.E., the largest statue in Egypt had the inscription 'I am ozymandias, king of kings; if anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits.' Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramses II of Egypt, 13th century B.C.E."

That footnote acts as a brief introduction to this 1818 poem 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."

"Ozymandias Shelley draft c1817".
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