While in office George Bush unwittingly nodded to it during an interview with Bob Woodward, responding to the question of how history will view the war in Iraq. Shelley's compassion for humanity in “Ozymandias” is neither melodramatic nor insincere it is infinite, a transcendent wind that will blow and stir the sands of our beautiful ruins forever If we are paying attention, we know that “Ozymandias” is always a part of contemporary life in one form or another. The poem is about power, certainly, but it is about power in a very particular way - the unique and definitively human tragedy of possessing both power (self-aware vitality) and the certainty of its demise (senescence and death). We resent hubris on the level of Ozymandias' at our own peril, because his wasted empire instantiates our own lives. Anyone who reads the poem with an eye toward having a laugh at the vanquished king's expense ( “What an asshole! Boy oh boy was he wrong in the end!“ ) is already a piece of that “shattered visage,“ an ironic accomplice to his own ignorance. More than a reflection on the triumph of entropy or the brevity of life, the poem is about how fantastically sad it is to be a human being, a creature given an ego - a miracle tool capable of devising the most intricate and ornately ambitious projects - with a built-in awareness of its own futility. That the average high school student learns “Ozymandias” as a simple moral takeaway, a souvenir to be tucked away somewhere and then forgotten, is tremendously unfortunate. The voice belongs equally to a grandmother on her deathbed who shares the story with a favorite grandchild, a bitterly won nugget of final wisdom to be cherished alone, later, in a private place. You can imagine the voice narrating his encounter on a street corner to no one in particular, a man lost in the most existential sense who must remain inside the poem to survive its truth. No, the voice is numb, flattened by the awe of escaping everyday busyness long enough to fully engage the ultimate fact.
Kanye west my beautiful dark twisted fantasy unedited cover full#
The poet's voice is not condescending or didactic or full of the sort of unctuousness an elder sibling might savor while ruining the Santa Claus myth for a little sister. Nothing lasts, life is fleeting, sic transit gloria mundi - thus passes the glory of the world. Nothing beside remains - in those three words floats the ancient lump in humanity's throat, the world's singular fact. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." 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. This is a shame, because “Ozymandias” is easily one of the weirdest, most penetrating meditations on the tragedy of human egotism ever produced. Bundled in countless anthologies with Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale," Wordsworth's “Daffodils,” and Byron's “She Walks in Beauty," Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ozymandias” is one of those poems that can feel like the drably comforting wallpaper in your grandmother's upstairs bathroom - an index of the unnoticed and the overfamiliar.
At some point in the tenth or eleventh grade, virtually every high school student in America studies a unit on the great Romantic poets.
0 kommentar(er)
