Ozymandias... Who?

In a time of American Idols and reality television shows more people than ever are hungry to achieve fame. Fame is that promise of immortal respect and power, that assurance of a seat alongside the pantheon of the fabled and mighty. Few, however, come to the realization of how quickly fame and respect can sour or more often... simply fade away. Clara Peller, Michael Jackson, Lief Garret, and Richard Nixon are all names of people who have followed to path of fame only to find the road led them to infamy or obscurity. How and will they be remembered? Fame and power do not translate into immortality; all deeds fade until all that remains is the shell of recorded history.

Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a poem about such a man, the pharaoh Ramses the 2^nd of Egypt. In his poem, Shelley makes wonderful word choices to establish his point about transitory power. In the first line, Shelley uses the word antique to describe Egypt- once one of the most powerful lands in the world. This word gives the reader a feeling of not only age, but of being out of date and irrelevant. It is amazing how one word can undermine the little remembered power of a nation.

The second line features the harsh repetition of the "T" sound in "...two vast and trunkless legs of stone".The sound echoes harshly on the tongue and gives one the gritty feel of these stony remains. The next few lines present one with the image of a broken face, almost hidden by the sands of times passing, whose legacy is apparent in his "wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" that the sculptor obviously felt moved to capture. The alliteration of the consonant sound "c" almost makes a mouth sneer of its' own accord as the line is read aloud. The following couple of lines reveal that these cold "passions" are all that remain of these otherwise "lifeless things", the contempt of this man and the satisfaction that such contempt brought him.

All is revealed in a swath of irony as the name of this broken visage is revealed upon the decayed pedestal of this shattered wreck. Engraved lie the words that command the mighty to" Look on my works... and despair!". With not even the pretext at wanting admiration, he tries to wield the power of fear post-humously in his works of stone and legacy of power- which are gone. "Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away".

Shelley has chosen the works of stone as the main vanity so many in power have used over the ages to attempt to capture their immortality. Busts, friezes ands sarcophagi- all means of recording a man, his body or his visage in stone for all time. Shelley clearly points out that stone may symbolize permanence, but stone does not promise it. Sands will scour stone, time will decay all images and fame and power will waste away until all that remains is a shattered visage and the few words history is slow to erase....

While fame may seem like a path to happiness, one should consider the tenets of positive psychology by Martin Seligman, the study of what makes people happy. While fame does make one happy, it is a transitory happiness, or so Seligman and his team at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered. The longest lasting happiness can be found through service to others. Please, I encourage you all to check out the Center for Positive Psychology at UPENN at http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/ . Until next time, much happiness to all my readers in the coming year.

SOURCES:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ozymandias
http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/