What we can learn from 'Ozymandias'

In an extract from his book The Covid Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again, published over the summer in the Sunday Times Magazine, Richard Horton notes that: 'Our museums are filled with the relics of ancient peoples who once thought their societies were stable and robust. The fragility of our civilisations has been brought into start relief by Covid-19'.

The reference to museums brought me straight back to one of my favourite sonnets, 'Ozymandias', which P.B. Shelley wrote in 1818 in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who composed a poem of the same name. Both poems were written (in part) in response to the news that the British Museum had acquired a fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth century BCE. But the title, 'Ozymandias', also referred to a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work". The sonnet is a brilliant deconstruction of hubris, or tragic pride, and can't help but recall the enormous egos of some of our national leaders in 2020.

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."

It is unsurprising that Shelley's poem has been influential on other poets thinking about the relationship between artefact and poem, between speaker and monument, and between the momentary and the lasting. What does it mean that the things that we create might outlast us, but might also live to laugh at us once we're gone? Leontia Flynn's brilliant poem 'Washington' uses snippets from Shelley's poem to comment on tourists who visit the Washington Monument in Washington D. C., deconstructing both the act of looking at such a monument and the egotism that the monument enshrines; meanwhile Morris Bishop's sonnet 'Ozymandias, Revisited' reworks the original sonnet's tissue of quotations as an exercise in graffiti. What all of these poems share is the understanding, like Horton's comments, that our 'civilisations' are fragile, no matter what we say, or create, to convince ourselves otherwise,