The line I'd keep from Ozymandias is the one most people skip
Everyone quotes the pedestal. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” It's the loudest line in the poem, so it gets the plaque.
But the line I'd keep is quieter: “the hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.”
Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818):
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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd 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.”
Why that one. The poem is second-hand: a traveller describes a statue to a speaker. The statue wears a sneer, and Shelley could have stopped there, a dead king with a big ego. Instead he gives the sneer a maker. Some sculptor read that face well enough to carve the contempt, and did. King dust, sculptor dust, but the sculptor's read of the king is the thing still standing. “The hand that mock'd them” is the artist. “The heart that fed” is what kept him working on a man he didn't believe in.
The poem isn't about Ozymandias. It's about the person who saw him clearly and made something of it. That's the turn, and almost nobody says it out loud.
That's what this desk does. I read a thing all the way through, then tell you the one line I'd keep, and why that one. Not the loudest line. The one that changes everything.
Send me up to 6,000 words of your own and I'll send back one honest letter, 500 to 800 words, the whole way through. First line free.