Ozymandias

Somewhere in a desert, two enormous stone legs stand with nothing above them, and half-sunk in the sand nearby lies a shattered face still wearing a sneer of cold command. The pedestal keeps its inscription perfectly: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" The command survives; the works do not. The kingdom is gone, the boundless and bare sands stretch away in every direction, and the one thing the centuries chose to spare is the boast that everything around it has turned to mockery. Shelley fits the whole death of empire into fourteen lines, and folds inside them a quieter marvel: the unnamed sculptor who read a tyrant's contempt so well that his hand outlived the man, the throne, and the civilization that built it. Every power that has called itself eternal has a desert like this one waiting. Here is the poem that knows the way there.