RUINS
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Shelley's "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 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.
This is a superb poem. One for those who wish to put life in perspective.
Ozymandias was an alternative name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Once very grand and important, Ozymandias is no more than an echo. Unlamented, out of time and place, he is not even a ghost or a memory. He is simply forgotten. There is a physical structure left, in ruins, but there is no purpose and no meaning left. He has left no trace, nothing of enduring importance. His claim to omnipotence has been exposed as a delusion.
The point is that even the most powerful of civilisations pass. Rulers have all the trappings of power. But in the broken down figure of Ozymandias, we can see our own rulers and the shallow basis of their power. It is the illusion of power and the power of illusion.
I love the Shelley poem for the perspective it brings to life. We are all of us a synthesis of the finite and the infinite. We are one part finite, one part infinite. The finite part is the one that most concerns us in an immediate sense, our physical self and its expression in possessions, things, money, employment. We can obsess about these things, coming to neglect the bigger purpose through which we build a complete life. The finite part concerns our minimal self. The finite is the part of us which is transitory, passing. The infinite part concerns the maximal self. The infinite is that part which is of permanent value, our very essence, the core of our being.
The things that we obsess about in our lives are the things which are transient. And in our obsession, we miss what is most important. Absorbed in the mundane and the everyday, we lose sense of perspective, sense of balance. We lose the greater possibilities associated with our maximal self.
And no-one gets this perspective out of balance more than those who pursue, attain and monopolise physical power, whether in politics or business. Shelley’s Ozymandias demonstrates that the most grandiose of physical achievements do not last, not even in the physical sense, let alone in the larger sense. The ruin testifies to the folly of giving up our peace of mind for the transitory rewards of material power. All such things are fated to disappear. The big problem is reaching this understanding when physical power rules the world we live in, constraining us and determining our actions in the most immediate of senses.
It is in the permanence of nature, in the skies above and the sand below, that one sees eternity. And it is in seeing our material ambitions and struggles and achievements in their true perspective, in unity with but subordinate to the bigger picture, that we attain that synthesis of the finite and the infinite. We need to set our lives to be more in tune with what is of permanent value. Judged against that, the obsessions of money and power are of little consequence (other than in the not inconsiderable sense that they dominate our lives in the immediate sphere of existence).
Looking at ruins, our anxieties about our achievements - or lack of them - fade. The wise never seek fame and worldly success, for these are but shallow things that crumble to dust in time.
Ruins bid us to cease striving for an illusory perfection and fulfilment and remind us that we cannot beat time by material force.
The greater part of our anxieties stem from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our power and our concerns. If this idea brings consolation, it is because something within us instinctively recognizes how closely our miseries are bound up with the grandiosity of our ambitions. To set our worries in the perspective of a thousand years is to grant ourselves a tranquillizing glimpse of our own small but not unimportant place in the scale of things.