Shelley's Ozymandias

I love Shelley's Ozymandias

The Japanese epic, the Tale of the Heike, begins like this:

The bells at Gionji
toll the passing of all things.
Twinned sala trees, white in full flower,
declare the great man's certain fall.
The mighty do not endure:
They are like a dream on a spring night
The bold and the brave perish in the end:
They are as dust before the wind.

The mighty do not endure. That was written around 1330. Shelley wrote Ozymandias in 1817 or 1818. Like all literature at the time, it seems to have been the product of a louche bet. Sitting around with Mary and Percy, their friend the banker Horace Smith suggested a writing competition. If lightning animated Frankenstein the last time the Shelleys played this game two years earlier, now it was the white Egyptian sun, in an extract from Diodorus Siculus.

The poem itself: some say it is about George IV and his ulcerous legs (get it?). Some say Napoleon. Some say it is part of a wave of orientalism in the early 19th century, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poppy dream Kublai Khan. Maybe. But to me, and ironically, it is much less ephemeral than all that.

The arc of the hubristic, up then dramatically down, is a universal literary theme. The dust before the wind. The Fall. The meek inherit the earth because the mighty, on whose works we may have looked on and despaired, are torn down from their thrones and nothing beside remains. Only the endless mass of plain, pitiless desert.

The not-quite sonnet rhyme scheme of the poem interlocks like silting-up desert sands or sinking centuries; it reflects the stacked-up generations of the poem’s characters: the “I” of poem, the traveller from an antique land, the architect who well those passions read, the Great King himself. Life piled on life were all too little: it is all a dream on a spring night. None of those characters can remain. Not Diodorus. Not the King of Kings. Only the desert, or the spring, or the wind carrying the dust.

The bringing down metaphor is literal in Ozymandias’s case, just as it is in the case of Icarus’s hubris. But we might identify with the wax-winged one. Similarly, we admire Achilles who, given the choice between a long and quiet life, and a short and glorious one, takes the second. Lucifer, the morning star, imitated Icarus’s challenge to Theocracy. Or the pharaoh’s to the sand. In all cases it is their very desire to stretch themselves beyond the bounds of the merest life that bring on the fall in the end. In most cases, I daresay, they would have said it was worth it for a kiss from Immortality.

Read Shelley’s poem alongside this from Briggflats by the northern bard Basil Bunting:

Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun's fires sink.

Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saints' bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter

silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.

Time mocks all our boasts. And so as the spring comes in we must enjoy our dreams, look how clouds dance, and delight in the transience of the white in full flower.

Shelley’s Ozymandias. I love Shelley’s Ozymandias.