Ozymandias
I encountered the poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley when I was a teenager exploring this strange and exciting thing called the “World Wide Web” sometime in the mid-to-late nineties. The poem fascinated me, and I spent the few minutes of effort necessary to memorize it. I started thinking about it again a couple of days ago while writing a comment about poetry on a post on the excellent Word & Song Substack. Here is the text of the poem, which I borrow from Wikipedia:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. 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 those 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 reader undoubtedly needs no commentary to see the themes of impermanence and the vanity of pride or ambition. In rereading this poem now, well over two decades after my initial encounter with it, I am not sure why my thoughts turn to Sallust’s description of ambition as the vice nearest to virtue in his treatment of Catiline. (Catiline's story might well provide another warning of the futility of ambition.)
In the poem, Ozymandias’s pride was indeed as unbounded as the lone and level sands that buried the memory of his vanished greatness. His self-description as “king of kings” brings to mind the use of that title for Jesus Christ. Shelley may have written it in subtle mockery of Christianity, suggesting that its era, too, will come to an end. I like to think of it in a contrary manner: All who have used that title, from ancient rulers to Libyan warlord Colonel Gaddafi, have been relegated to footnotes of history, except for the true Sovereign to whom Paul and John applied the title. Thus Ozymandias’s presumption in asserting a universal rule that rightly belongs to God rendered inevitable his fall into nothingness, much like Nebuchadnezzar’s inappropriate pride and ambition preceded his fall, as described by the prophet in Isaiah 14:12-14, which is often understood as an allegory of the fall of Satan.
Well, the poem is a great illustration of the silliness, the utter pointlessness of pride. Shelley would undoubtedly disagree with my conclusion, but I believe it to inevitably follow from the poem’s message: You might as well give the glory to God, because it won’t last if you try to keep it for yourself.