Feeling Poetic

At the British Museum I felt I was keeping company with Keats and Shelley:

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats

(excerpt)

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!	45
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

[grandly] "One Grecian urn!" "Golly, that's amazing!"

Name that movie, people.

"Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley 

(Isn't the name "Bysshe" such fun to say? Try it once or twice.)

According to the description, this statue of Ramesses II was the inspiration for Shelley's poem.

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".