I’ve been watching the BBC programme Russia 1985–1999 and of course it contains scenes of huge statues being toppled as communism was overthrown.
Shelley’s well-known poem about the ephemeral nature of power has been increasingly on my mind in this strange year of war and political upheaval.
It dates from the early nineteenth century and it’s an amazing thought that empires and tyrannies have risen and fallen since then, yet the poem itself has survived. Shelley himself has become like the sculptor that he describes.
It’s somehow reassuring to think that like Ozymandias, Vladimir Putin will one day be just another half-forgotten figure from the past.
Ozymandias by Shelley
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.”
The Good Reader 