Pyramids (Terry David John Pratchett) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

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Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramses the Second. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias is famous, but because it is short and it has always been a favourite of mine I hope you will forgive me the indulgence of reproducing it here in full:

Ozymandias

I met a traveler 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 their 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.”

While I was browsing the net in order to find an on-line copy of Ozymandias so that I could cut-and-paste the text, I came across a wonderful piece of related information. It appears that in 1817 Shelley held a sonnet-writing session with his friend, the poet Horace Smith. Both wrote a sonnet on the same subject, but while Shelley came up with the aforementioned Ozymandias, Mr Smith produced something so delightfully horrendous I simply have to indulge even further, and include it here as well. By now the connection to our original annotation has been completely lost, but I think you might agree with me that Smith’s poem would be worthy of Creosote:

On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in

the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

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!

Naught but the leg remaining to disclose

The sight of that forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,

He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

What wonderful, but unrecorded, race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The poem was cited by Guy Davenport of the University of Kentucky in a New York Times article a few years ago, which concluded: “Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.”