PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

redbrick sonnet recasting:

I met a wanderer, dust in his eyes,

who spoke of stone legs, severed, alone.
The desert kept them, mute, beneath its skies,

a face half‑buried, sneer carved into bone.

The sculptor’s hand still whispers through the scar,

fierce lips that mocked, a frown that would not fade.

Passions embalmed in granite, cold as war,

a ghost of flesh where once dominion played.

Upon the base, the boast remains intact: 

Ozymandias—king of kings, behold! 

Yet silence answers, time has made its pact,

and left the wreckage, vast and grey, and cold.

Around the ruin, endless sands unroll—

a barren hymn to empire’s vanished soul.

contemporary translation:

I met a traveler from an ancient land,

Who told me of two trunkless legs of stone

That stood alone; and near them on the sand

Half-buried lay a shattered visage, lone.

Its frown, its wrinkled lip, that cold-commanded sneer,

Still spoke in chisel-marks the sculptor read;

Those passions, fierce and lifeless, linger here,

Impressed and sealed where flesh and glory bled.

Beneath, the pedestal proclaims with pride:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and deride"—

Yet nothing else survives of all these things.

Around that colossal wreck, bare, vast, and grey,

The lone, level sands stretch boundless far away.