An Antique Sand King

I mocked the words of a wrinkled traveller
Who met Ozymandias, the sand sculptor,
Beside a lone pedestal in the desert:

     “A wreck of a lifeless heart
     Lies sunk in the vast sands.
     Two things fed its shatter’d remains:
     A bare hand and a colossal despair.
     Those stamp’d passions tell that
     Nothing is boundless in its decay!”

A decay whose command is cold and level?
I stretch my lip in a mighty sneer.
Ozymandias, read well the frown on my visage...
My heart is stone and yet I survive.

s.d.
(Note: All of the words in "An Antique Sand King" are recycled from Shelley's famous sonnet "Ozymandias")

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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd 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.