IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart 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.
Jordan~ wrote:With Ozymandian and phosphoresce, I think we're seeing a return to her not being embarrassed to use her vocabulary. She toned it down a little after hydrocephalitic, spelunking, etc. on Ys, the words critics always quoted as exemplary of her style.
That "John's force" is confusing, too. I think "contaminant" could be being used adjectivally, to mean "contaminating", but I'm not sure. I seem to recall her using a similar word similarly in another song. So it'd be, "in whose employ, contaminant, [this older man] proceeded ______".
The cause is Ozymandian.
The map of Sapokanikan
is sanded and bevelled,
the land lone and levelled
by some unrecorded and powerful hand
which plays along the monument
and drums upon a plastic bag.
The brave men and women, so dear to God
and famous to all of the ages' rag,
sang:
"Do you love me?
Will you remember?"
The snow falls above me.
Around the hand, the rerounders.
The event is in the hand of God.
Beneath a patch of grass, her
bones the old Dutch master hid.
Well, I swear Tobias
and the angel disguise
what the scholars surmised was a mother and kid
interred with other daughters
in dirt in other potters' fields.
Above them, parades
mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch in marble and steel,
where all of the twenty-thousand attending your foot fall
and the causes they died for are lost in the idling bird calls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence.
The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal
with any fluorescence
where the hand of the master begins and ends.
I fell, I tried to do well but I won't be.
Go tell the one that I love to remember and hold me.
I call, I call for the doctor
but the snow swallows me whole with ole Florry Walker
and the event lives only in print.
He said:
"It's alright,"
and "It's all over now,"
and boarded the plane,
his belt unfastened;
the boy was known to show unusual daring.
And, called a “boy”,
this alderman confounding Tammany Hall
(In whose employ
King Tamanend himself preceded John’s fall).
So we all raise a standard
to which the wise and honest so may repair,
to which a hunter,
a hundred years from now, may look and despair
and see with wonder
the tributes we have left to rust in the parks,
swearing that our hair stood on end
to see John Purroy Mitchel depart
for the Western front where my work might count.
O mercy (?) to go out.
I will the hunter to decipher the stone
and what lies under. The city is gone.
So look and despair.
Look and despair.
"My one wish," he added, "is to get over to the western front, where I can do some work that will count"
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