4 ms·
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
by tlocke 3y ago
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.”
- tsukikage 3y agoThe Palace - Rudyard Kipling When I was a King and a Mason - a Master proven and skilled I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build. I decreed and dug down to my levels. Presently under the silt I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built. There was no worth in the fashion - there was no wit in the plan - Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran - Masonry, brute, mishandled, but carven on every stone: "After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I too have known. Swift to my use in the trenches, where my well-planned ground-works grew, I tumbled his quoins and his ashlars, and cut and reset them anew. Lime I milled of his marbles; burned it slacked it, and spread; Taking and leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead. Yet I despised not nor gloried; yet, as we wrenched them apart, I read in the razed foundations the heart of that builder’s heart. As he had written and pleaded, so did I understand The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he had planned. When I was a King and a Mason, in the open noon of my pride, They sent me a Word from the Darkness. They whispered and called me aside. They said - "The end is forbidden." They said - "Thy use is fulfilled. "Thy Palace shall stand as that other’s - the spoil of a King who shall build." I called my men from my trenches, my quarries my wharves and my sheers. All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years. Only I cut on the timber - only I carved on the stone: "After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known."
- akuchling 3y ago"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone." -- Jorge Luis Borges, somewhere.