Horace Smith’s
Ozymandias

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the desert knows:
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty city shows
“The wonders of my hand.” The city’s gone,
Nought but the leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

[Did you notice the phrase, “holding the wolf in chace”? Tina Lewis Rowe tells us that “chace” was simply the poetic spelling of chase, and that Smith’s poem was a futuristic view that one day a king, or perhaps a military leader, would be roaming the world and waging war (chasing the wolf,) and stumble upon the ruins of London.]