OZYMANDIAS
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.
If that doesn't goose your skin, I don't know what will! Now, having said all that, Ozymandias is not Satan, as is often thought, but represented an Egyptian pharaoh. And today the pharaohs aren't forgotten in a lost desert -- they and their works are visited by millions of tourists every year. But having said that, far more "Great Kings" than the couple hundred or so pharaoh have trod the Earth, and the vast bulk of them are now dust.
3 comments:
That's great.
It really makes you feel the depths of time in the human past, and how time can wipe away so much while leaving only a "pedestal" as testament. Yet still we can learn something (one hopes), even when the scene is "boundless and bare."
Lots of meaning there.
Seeing how it's just after Earth Day, perhaps a lesson is in seeking personal glory at the expense of, well, everything else. Creating monuments to ourselves and turning Eden into a desert - and in the end we've lost it all.
>>perhaps a lesson is in seeking personal glory at the expense of, well, everything else.
>>
exactly.
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