I met a traveler 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 collossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The photograph of the stone face was taken by Roger Hickey in Boboli Gardens , a large and elegant garden located in Florence, Italy.  The sculpture of the face predates Shelley's poem, which was written in 1817.  Nevertheless, the first thing that I thought of when I came across this sculpture was that this is the face of Ozymandias.

Why is this poem contained in a link from the course Horror in Film & Story?  First of all, I think this poem speaks, in a very real way, to the "horror" of human mortality.  Whatever material accomplishments we make during our lives is so much dust in the wind.   We will examine this idea, particularly with regard to the novel "Frankenstein" and the film "Blade Runner".

Secondly, the poem was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was maried to Mary Shelley at the time that she wrote Frankenstein.  Undoubtedly, Percy's poetry had a very real effect on her thinking.