The Fate of Ozymandias

I am not much of a poet. I have never really found the knack for it. I took a creative writing class in high school. I enjoyed it, but I was not that good, although one of my poems was chosen to be included in the school poetry magazine. Some people can memorize poetry. I am not one of those people, however, there is one poem that has always stuck in my head. The poem is Ozymandias written by the early 19th century British poet Percy Shelley. It goes like this:

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.

Vanity is a characteristic found only in the human species. This poem shows the inevitable conclusion of one man's immense ego. It also shows the futility and relative little impact that one individual retains over the years...regardless of the lives that individual might have destroyed during the time of that persons existence, for it is merely on a chessboard that we humans dwell. Ozymandias dreamed of being remembered throughout time as some figure of great importance. Instead he became a relic of something that once was...a forgotten...solitary figure lost through indifference and the passing of time. Shelley creates in Ozymandias, a superficial king, obsessed with shaping his own destiny. He takes the reader back to a different period in time to show the futility of power and glory. He explains how the ego can become lost in its own illusion of self importance. It is assumed that Ozymandias created great cities and monuments, perhaps great works of art which he believed would preserve his identity forever. Shelly, however, shows that nothing is forever. Ozymandias suffered the same fate as other great rulers and despots of the past who believed that they were somehow shaping the destiny of this small, insignificant planet (at least as it relates to the cosmos as a whole) Didn't Caesar, Bonaparte, and Alexander build great empires only to eventually lose them? In the end it is time and distance that destroys Ozymandias and those like him. As Shelley said best "The lone and level sands stretch far away."

                                               Percy Shelley (1792-1822)