The cruelest month: Lone and level sands

You can’t run a National Poetry Month in an English-speaking country (okay—mostly English-speaking; in certain parts) without having at least one of the Romantic poets. So today I give you Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.

(As an aside, why does MSFT Word’s spellchecker recognize the “Bysshe” in Shelley’s name but the title of one of his greatest poems? Philistines—they’re all Philistines.)

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.’

As with many of the poems I’m posting this month, “Ozymandias” has been with me since high school; Mr. Sheinkopf—probably the best English teacher I’ve ever had—did a poetry module in the tenth grade.

Here’s what we did with “Ozymandias”: we diagrammed it—you know, breaking apart the structure and laying it out in a diagram so you can see how everything hangs together. (Well, maybe those readers who aren’t clear about the differences between direct and indirect objects, or between transitive and intransitive verbs might want to skip this part.)

And the first 11 lines are incredibly complex and convoluted, building up to that ultimate self-puffery, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” We had that sucker all over the chalkboard, spiking out into all directions, doglegs of dependent clauses hanging off like Christmas tree ornaments.

And that is followed by the ultimate in stark simplicity and absolute put-down: “Nothing beside remains.” Subject, verb, preposition (with implied object—the colossal wreck).

I always thought about that colossal wreck in the boundless and bare setting whenever I saw scenes like the tearing down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, or collections of discarded socialist-realism statues of Soviet heroes that alternately molder and amuse.

Shelley so perfectly captured the ludicrousness of megalomania; sadly, still applicable.

(That's you, Larry Ellison.)