Fourteen lines about a ruined statue in the desert, and the inscription that survives: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Shelley wrote this in a sonnet competition with his friend Horace Smith; both wrote about the same subject. Shelley's version won, and has been remembered for two centuries. The irony is perfect: the king who commanded despair is now nothing but shattered stone. The boundless and bare sands stretch far away. It is a poem about power, about time, about the vanity of human ambition. It fits on half a page and contains eternity.