If you struggle to memorize whole poems, as some of us do, it’s still efficacious to remember bits and pieces, to treasure up and produce at need. Into every life, at some time or other, will surely fall the need to say to someone else, in that tone of level detachment that is several standard deviations sharper than sarcasm, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” 

This is, after all, the one line in “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), that anyone can quote without trying. The rest of the sonnet, with its intricate rhyme scheme — ababacdcedefef — serves as a setting for that ironic boast. As the poem begins, a “traveller from an antique land” turns up as a mechanism for reporting the news from the desert. The “lone and level sands stretch far away” into a vanishing distance at the end. In between, the stone remains of “Ozymandias, King of Kings,” that once-living sovereign, that work of art intended for immortality, lie scattered beneath the pitiless sun.

Having looked on the works of Ozymandias, the “traveller” has not despaired. Instead he has brought back that line, a souvenir, immortal as long as anyone remembers it, for posterity to relish, remember, and repeat. We know that our works, too, are kingdoms built on sand. And sometimes it’s good to quote poetry to our friends, to remind them. 

Ozymandias
by 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 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.”

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.