One night I dreamed I stood alone,

One night I dreamed I stood alone,
Alone in a poem I'd so hated in school.

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Lay prone amid rock strewn desert rubble
And at my feet, a marble eye and broken lips,
Disdainful despite the wind blown sand.
Up a cliff clung the huge ruined pedestal
From which the statue'd been blown.
Despite its awful ruined and defiled state,
Something of the sculptor's art still remained.
Blasted in the sand, those lips retained
In their sneer of cold command,
The indifferent cruelty that'd been the man.

The lips spoke in a voice harsh as the barren air,
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, mortal, and despair!"

Getting up my courage I prepared
To falter out the poem's remembered moral
But those lips sneered a contemptuous dismissal,
"Look on what flowed from my loins
Through all my wives, across all the generations,
What do I care for stone,
When the eyes that look upon it are my own."

With that I found myself awake
Aware of a tangled and lingering despair.
Restless, I rose and went down the hall
To look upon my own still innocent sleeping pair.