AMC has released a new poetic, ominous "Breaking Bad" teaser that features Walter White (Bryan Cranston) reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1818 sonnet "Ozymandias ."
Cranston reads the poem in White's gravelly voice as time-lapse shots of the New Mexico desert, Walter and Jesse Pinkman's RV and the White residence flash across the screen.
Ozymandias was the name that the Romans called Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II . The poem tells the story of an empire that has collapsed over time, which mirrors a likely theme of the final "Breaking Bad" episodes: Walter White's inevitable fall from atop the meth trade.
Poetry played a large role in where "Breaking Bad" left off. At the end of the first half of Season 5, Walter's brother-in-law, DEA Agent Hank Schrader, discovered his secret "Heisenberg" identity by reading an inscription in Walt Whitman's "Leaves Of Grass."
Below, you can give "Ozymandias " a read, courtesy of The Literature Network:
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 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 colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
The final episodes of "Breaking Bad" premiere Sunday, August 11 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.
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