Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley(1818)
Extract
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in a desert, and near them a shattered visage lies half sunk in the sand, its sculptor having read well those passions which yet survive stamped on lifeless things. Percy Bysshe Shelley composed this sonnet in 1818, and in fourteen lines delivered the definitive meditation on the vanity of earthly power. The pedestal's inscription, commanding the mighty to look upon these works and despair, achieves its ironic force from the nothing that surrounds it, the lone and level sands stretching far away. Shelley understood that time is the one empire that never falls, and the poem itself, outlasting every monument it describes, enacts the paradox it proclaims: art alone endures.
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Coleridge builds the same vanished palace from a fragment, but Shelley's desert is emptier and the lesson is harsher.
Eliot expands Shelley's lone desert ruin into an entire landscape of civilisational collapse.
Marcus Aurelius sits on the throne Ozymandias lost and practises the humility the inscription refuses.