Ozymandias reconsidered.
The poem is familiar; Shelly penned it in 1818 and the final lines are well known.
The jist of it is: A traveler in a strange land, a desert full of ruins, sees the bottom of what was once, judging by it’s foot, a giant statue and a head of a sneering, over-proud God-King. The inscription beneath reads:
“I am Ozymandias king of kings, look upon my works ye mighty and despair.”
The common interpretation of this is that, though the statue’s commissioner intended it to be a monument of their vast power and wealth, it has become a monument to the ultimate futility of power, laughable as it is against the flow of time. Therefore, ye mighty, look upon the wastes and ruins and despair, because this is what happens to the King of Kings and this is what will happen to you.
However, there is a different interpretation that one could take. A 21st century impression.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains statues of Kings of Kings from 3000 years ago, busts of rulers who were revered as gods and demanded to live forever. If in a glass case there was a giant foot standing on a base, and a stone head that through which hubris, command and authority still shone, then the words “Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair.” Take on the opposite of the accepted meaning. 3000 years later the work is being viewed by tens of thousands of people each year, who marvel at it’s construction, at the craftsman’s skill and {imagine} what the King of Kings must have been.
The mighty now would do well to tremble at that kind of legacy, Ozymandias has achieved immortality, as have Hatsheput, Darius, Alexander and the others who Shelley originally was faulting for their pride in creating vain statues.
In 3000 years we can imagine, Mount Rushmore and the Washington Needle sitting in a gallery with people wondering why Teddy Roosevelt was up there in the first place.
Monuments to the ancient world survive, and in them survive the leaders and the cultures.
John Hutt 