A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

Katy Evans-Bush thinks much can be learned from an unsuccessful poem about what makes poems fail. She shows us the other Ozymandias, written by Shelley's friend Horace Smith in that famous competition. One can only hope that Smith himself saw instantly how outclassed he was. Do go there and read it - it's most instructive.

I've long had a fantasy of editing an anthology of bad poems, with a commentary, as a tool of instruction, but Nicholas Parsons got there first with his Joy of bad Verse. Lack of imagination, failure of nerve, and above all a lack of sensitivity to language are the commonest failings. McGonagall is treasured for his tin ear and his heroic mastery of bathos. Smith isn't in this sort of class either. He's just not terribly good.

But perhaps it's not so much what makes Smith's poem fail, as noticing, as Katy does, that it has a couple of good bits. And it's a question of what makes Shelley's poem so good. Where Shelley makes things up, and visualises them for us, Smith's poem is for the most part literal, unimaginative. He doesn't recognise the potential in the data. Starting with the same material as Shelley, almost every decision he makes is conventional:

Here's the fragment of statue, all alone; the Leg is all that's left of the civilisation; it could be the same for London one day. Civilisations pass. Smith takes Ozymandias for granted, is uninquisitive about the nature of power, save for its transience.

The first good bit - and I concur with her judgement - is the image of the Hunter "[thro' the wilderness/ where London stood,] holding the Wolf in chace". I don't know why Katy likes this bit, but I like it because it gives us an identifiable agent in the poem in contrast to the undefined and almost abstract "We"), and a new perspective of time, a sense of the altered state of London now a forest; that lovely period diction "holding the Wolf in chace" manages to suggest a relationship between the Hunter and hunted, some kind of controlled distance, like a dog on a lead. The Hunter is skilled. There is something intimate about it.

And how distracting that Hunter would find "some fragment huge", so ill-defined and unexpected, on his purposeful quest. It distracts us too: I wondered how a bit of statue had got from Egypt to London - via the British Museum perhaps? - before I pulled myself together. Oh, and I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic scenarios.

The second good bit she identifies is the closing couplet, and I must admit it raised a smile to my lips too. The polysyllabic adjectives cling to monosyllabic, simplistic rhymes. The second adjective, in the last line, is even longer than the first, so when the second shoe drops there is a fitting sense of build-up and bathos. It's interesting that Smith felt the need to relate the desert statue back to the situation of the assumed reader. He couldn't trust the statue itself, or the reader, to do the work, but had to draw an explicit moral: "some Hunter may express/ Wonder like ours..." The switched focus leaches energy from the original image. Not that the original image is very clear; it's treated as a given. There is something almost comic about the "gigantic Leg" because it could be anything. Actually there is one other almost good bit, which is the "[gigantic Leg], which far off throws/ The only shadow that the Desart knows".

Shelley lets the statue be the focus. His Ozymandias is a story, "I met a traveller... who said..." and it is the traveller who describes the statue. By putting the words into his mouth, he manages to give it an oral immediacy, both an authority (literally) and mythic status, a distance and a reason for being told.

And thereafter the focus is on the statue. Well, not exactly - because in piecing the statue together, Shelley conjures the subject of the statue himself, zooming in on the "frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" and even the hapless sculptor. We are right there with the antique traveller, seeing a tyrant's statue. And its empty boast. The poem is filmic in its attention. One could use Shelley's poem as a shooting script for a short. And the genius of the ending, which leaves the poem at the point where Horace Smith started his: the bare and level sands stretch far away.