Poem of the Day: ‘Ozymandias’

If you struggle to memorize whole poems, as some of us do, it’s still efficacious to remember bits and pieces, to treasure up and produce at need. Into every life, at some time or other, will surely fall the need to say to someone else, in that tone of level detachment that is several standard deviations sharper than sarcasm, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” 

This is, after all, the one line in “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), that anyone can quote without trying. The rest of the sonnet, with its intricate rhyme scheme — ababacdcedefef — serves as a setting for that ironic boast. As the poem begins, a “traveller from an antique land” turns up as a mechanism for reporting the news from the desert. The “lone and level sands stretch far away” into a vanishing distance at the end. In between, the stone remains of “Ozymandias, King of Kings,” that once-living sovereign, that work of art intended for immortality, lie scattered beneath the pitiless sun.

Having looked on the works of Ozymandias, the “traveller” has not despaired. Instead he has brought back that line, a souvenir, immortal as long as anyone remembers it, for posterity to relish, remember, and repeat. We know that our works, too, are kingdoms built on sand. And sometimes it’s good to quote poetry to our friends, to remind them.