Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Moe Dodson's avatar

Yes, what will London be 500 years on? One of Shelley's friends, Horace Smith wrote a poem to compete against Shelley's "Ozymandias" in a 'friendly competition'. Smith was a stockbroker who became very rich, lived to a ripe old age in the bosom of his family in Tunbridge Wells, and who wrote ca. 20 novels, etc. I like his poem better than Shelley's, imagining London in the far off future as a wilderness:

WB Shelley (whose wife created the Frankenstein story):

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."

Horace Smith wrote this:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the desert knows:-

"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,

"The King Of Kings; this mighty City shows

The wonders of my hand." - The City's gone,-

Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose

The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, - and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Expand full comment
Jack Trent's avatar

I'm a little behind on my reading. The place Guy Debord ending up living was in Middle-Of-Nowhere-Auvergne. I think it is not far from the schoolhouse in "Avoir et Etre". The schoolteacher sued the director. Is this psychogeography?

Expand full comment
11 more comments...

No posts