Ozymandias Recycled

A traveller 

mocked a king,
beside the sand
round which cold passions
command decay
and said,

‘Frown away,
sneer, half despair,
look on the desert sands,
sunk and level;
bare the lip,
read these lifeless words
far from those stone remains
that met the wreck of things.

‘Kings appear colossal,
who survive the boundless,
and name its lies:
that mighty sculptor
whose wrinkled visage
and vast antique hand
shattered yet stamped
my land and heart.’

I stretch these legs,
stand them trunkless
on that lone pedestal,
and tell Ozymandias,
‘Well, nothing works’.

© BH, 2019

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An experiment. Hacking up a classic poem and rendering another from the bits. To be clear, I've missed a few 'ands' and 'ons', otherwise these are the self-same words as Percy Bysshe used.

I think I posted this somewhere… But now I forget…

To keep you right, here’s Shelley’s original text:

Ozymandias - - 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.”