Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup by Students and Staff at the University of Virginia
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Sources

London : Leigh and John Hunt, 1818Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" was first published in a weekly newspaper called The Examiner on January 11, 1818. The Examiner was published in London by the brothers Leigh and John Hunt, who regularly published poetry in the pages of their journal. Our edition is transcribed from that first printing. We have, however, corrected a typographical error, adding a final quotation mark at the end of the poem that is missing in the original. The image is taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Editorial Statements

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section for more information.

Citation

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ode to the West Wind">. The Examiner, Leigh and John Hunt, 1818 , 24 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/ShelleyP/shelley-ozymandias. Accessed: 2024-04-28T06:52:55.062Z
[Audio File]AudioAudio
Librivox recording of "Ozymandias," read by David Barnes OZYMANDIAS 1I met a Traveller from an antique land, 2Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 3Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, 4Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 5And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 6Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 7Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 8The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 9And on the pedestal, these words appear: 10'My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings;' 11Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! 12Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 13Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare 14The lone and level sands stretch far away." GLIRASTES.GlirastesGlirastes"Glirastes," the made-up name by which Shelley signed this poem in its first printing in The Examiner on January 11, 1818, is an inside joke and a note of affection for his wife Mary Shelley. (Remarkably, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, had been published less than two weeks earlier, on January 1.) Percy Shelley's pet name for Mary was (for reasons unknown) "dormouse." "Glirastes" is a compound word that Shelley made up, combining the the Latin word "gliradae," the scientific name for dormice, and the Greek "erastes," meaning "lover of." Hence "lover of dormouse"--an affectionate, coded gesture to Mary.

Footnotes