Audiobook · read by volunteers
Ozymandias of Egypt
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010), Annie Coleman Rothenberg, David Barnes, Graham Williams, JemmaBlythe, featherheadfop, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Kirsten Tomlinson, Karen Savage, Lenny Glionna Jr. · 16 chapters · 21 min
About the book
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.” Few lines in English poetry have travelled as far as the cry of Shelley’s ruined king, and few poems wrap so much into so little. A traveller returns from an ancient land with a story of a shattered statue half buried in the sand, a frowning face, a proud inscription and a desert that stretches away on every side. Shelley published it in 1818, and it has been quoted, parodied and learned by heart ever since. This recording gathers sixteen different readings of the same sonnet, each with its own voice and its own pace, so that you can hear how many ways one short poem can be spoken. Lasting barely a minute and a half in each version, it invites you to listen once, then again, and to decide which reader’s Ozymandias you prefer.
Introduction
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 and drowned off the Italian coast in 1822, a few weeks short of his thirtieth birthday. In that short life he wrote some of the most memorable poems of the English Romantic movement, and Ozymandias, dated 1818, is among the best known. It is a sonnet, fourteen lines long, and it describes a traveller’s account of a broken statue standing alone in a desert. Shelley turns that image into a meditation on power, pride and the way time wears down even the proudest monuments.
This recording belongs to LibriVox’s weekly poetry project. For the week of August 20th, 2006, the volunteers each recorded the poem, and the result is a collection of sixteen versions, listed one after another from Version 1 onward. The whole set lasts roughly twenty-five minutes. Because the poem is so short, the differences between readers become the real subject: one may speak it as a calm story, another as a warning, another with a quiet irony. Hearing them in sequence is a small lesson in how interpretation shapes a text.
There is no need to listen to all sixteen at once. You can pick a version, enjoy it, and return another day for a different voice. The poem is short enough to memorise, and many listeners end up doing exactly that.
Ozymandias is still read in classrooms and quoted in newspapers whenever power seems unshakeable, which is perhaps the best reason to listen to it today. In a few minutes it says what many long books struggle to say.
Public domain
Percy Bysshe Shelley died in 1822: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text