Ozymandias Percy Bysshe Shelley John O'Brioen Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup Students and Staff at the University of Virginia National Endowment for the Humanities Literature in Context
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Published by Literature in Context under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License "Ode to the West Wind"> Percy Bysshe Shelley The Examiner London Leigh and John Hunt 1818 Shelley'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. 24 English print single poem

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 Numbered divs used. Library of Congress Name Authority File Library of Congress Classification Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Open Researcher and Contributor ID created Literature in Context Edition [Audio File] Librivox recording of "Ozymandias," read by David Barnes
OZYMANDIAS I met a Traveller from an antique land, Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. 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." GLIRASTES. "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.