"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

--Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

Bev Smith taught this poem in ENG 262, English literature II, when I took it 25 years ago.  I have no recollection of whether or not I did well on that exam,  nor do I have any idea why it suddenly popped into my head while out walking recently.  I must have stored it in my subconscious during class. 

Shelley was an atheist.  This wasn't uncommon during the Romantic period of English literature--the Romantics thought nature was God.  Romantic era literature, painting, and music all depict this intense love for the natural world, so it isn't really accurate the say Shelley was an atheist, for, as David Foster Wallace puts it,  "everyone worships something."

And it's in "Ozymandias" that Shelley comments on mankind's most often-worshiped god:  SELF.

The poem goes like this:

I met a traveler 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.

So Ozymandias (Ramses II) makes some giant, stone monument to himself and sticks it out in the Egyptian desert for all to see.  To show how great he is.  To make himself the center of the universe...or at least the amount of the universe that he knew about. Ok.  

Looking back on Egypt and its greatness through the lens of 2019, it is easy for us to just shake our head at the audacity of the pharaohs.  Where you at now, Ozy?? Huh??? What then???  

But we do the same thing, don't we?  Look around....humanism everywhere!  Monuments. Skyscrapers.  Statues of coaches who haven't even retired yet.  Buildings on campuses with peoples' names plastered on the outside in 12" letters.  I've even joked with Greg Aplin before about having such success with the Ensemble that the only thing left to do is decide what font we want our names in when they rename the Dixon Center after us.  Of course, that's all in jest, but it speaks to two things that live in our deepest heart of hearts:  we like to feel important, and we want to be remembered. 

The fact that this blog even exists in the first place indicates that I think people care what I think.  That I'm of some importance.  I might be.  But I'm probably not.  One day when I was a band director, I missed a couple day of school due to sickness.  The day I went back to work, Mrs. Henderson said to me "Mr. Brewer, I didn't even notice you were gone."  That was humbling.  And it speaks the real truth: none of us is THAT important in the long run.  

In the poem, right after the line "look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair," something amazing happens:  Shelley basically says "hold my beer."  Boom.  The next line:  "nothing beside remains."  Nothing.  Nothing but a colossal wreck.  The greatest ruler in the history of the Egyptian empire became nothing.

 He wanted to be eternal, and yet he was reduced to a broken statue, half-covered by barren sand standing in a desert commemorated by a poet who most 

people reading this probably don't remember studying in an

 English class taught by someone who's now dead. 

All that "greatness" reduced to nothing because of too much self.  Too much self because of too much pride.  And pride goes before a fall.  So I'm going to work on being less prideful because I don't want to be like Ozymandias--relegated to being remembered ONLY when someones opens a literature textbook in a class they won't even realize the significance of until years and years later.  

God Bless.