“Ozymandias”
One of the most famous works by Percy Bysshe Shelley. He started writing it in 1817, it was first published on January 11th, 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 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.
In the expression of a shattered visage fallen to the ground from a colossal statue, something strikingly familiar can seemingly be preserved throughout the ages by being observed in the now, traveling from the ancient past to our eye and into our imagination.
The passions fed by the heart of Ozymandias in his desire to be the king of kings were mocked by the hand of the artist, who saw and seized a great opportunity to immortalize his own extraordinary technical skill and strength of imagination in recklessly depicting the hollow pride of a powerful man who tries to overrule his transience by preserving his own image, carved into stone, inadvertently resulting in the most embarassing display of his own ignorance, a charicature stamped on stone, outlasting the rise and fall of empires.
Both, the sculptor and the model, have long passed on. What truly survives is what can be observed and recognized, resonating across time, reminding us that even though the presence of those passions was just as masterfully exposed and ridiculed in the past as it is now yet somehow it invariably seems to remain a part of who we are, preserved in us, in human nature. To me, the poet has woven into words his despair in the face of this realization.
