Here reality and fiction intermix like desert sands, obscuring all but obscurity itself. How fitting it is then that ‘Ozymandias’ through titulature alone begins as a corruption of history, blurring the line of myth and recorded fact, just as writers in the east did for Solomon centuries before. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.” Diodorus Siculus, ‘Bibliotheca Historica‘ – 60 BC The title ‘Ozymandias’ itself is the Grecised form of the throne name of Ramesses II, ‘Usermaatre Setepenre’, and indeed the “antique land” thus described is not Egypt, as it might first be imagined, but in fact Greece, home of ancient historian Diodorus Siculus, who can be credited with that inscription paraphrased in the most hubristic lines of Shelley’s poem: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” It forms but half of a pair of poems, both originally sharing the same title, composed in competition between Shelley and writer Horace Smith. Yet of all poems concerning the fate of mankind, few stand as stark upon their pedestals as ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), the most famous work of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, (husband to Mary Shelley, of ‘Frankenstein’ fame). What good is man’s legacy, those words he writes as if upon the surface of waves, there one moment and gone the next? It would seem the only thing not forgotten is change itself. Nowhere more succinctly is the inevitable onslaught of change described, that tide to wash away all things. Solomon answers: “This too will pass away.” Though the eponymous ring is nowhere to be found in Fitzgerald’s retelling, ‘Solomon’s Seal’ (1852), he once again calls upon the Hebrew King’s terrible, almost inhuman wisdom a nameless sultan comes before Solomon seeking a sentence that will always hold true, irrespective of the ebbs and flows of humanity and its struggles, to bring him joy in his deepest miseries, and ground him in sadness when he is elated. Through the Seal of Solomon, a hexagrammic ring engraved by the hand of God, he was said to have exerted his earthly will over both demons and djinn, and hold discourse with wild beasts. In the east such writers had long attributed the biblical King of Israel, Solomon, with a wealth of mystic and occult powers. The English poet Edward Fitzgerald is best remembered for his modern translations of Persian Rubáiyát, a form of quatrain, or four-lined poem, from such medieval Sufi poets as astronomer Omar Khayyam, Rumi, and Attar of Nishapur.
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