What's in a name?

Sometimes when we read a poem we go off somewhere else and travel on other paths than those the author intended for us. No don't worry, I am not going to do an attempt at poetry 101 or on how to interpret a poem, because a poem speaks differently to different people and even in another way to the same people at different times. Sometimes it even remains silent.

Well this particular poem keeps popping up into my life at regular intervals in the most uncanny way, and no it isn't Shakespeare. First time I saw it, I was still in school, during one of the long English literature classes, dealing with poems and their interpretation, the rhymes and measures and all that stuff. I liked it even then. (well not the interpretation part but the poem) And it has been coming back to haunt me ever since, as if some hidden power somewhere conspires to keep throwing it in my face.

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe 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.

So the poem was written about Ramses II, Pharaoh of ancient Egypt and one of the greatest Pharaohs known. Well not just judging by the amount of temples and all those colossal statues he had carved to his likeness and scattered all over the country from the north way down to the south at the borders with Sudan. Well he will be remembered, for being larger than life and also for many other things. He will be remembered because great people are and because he lived up to his greatness, even if now he is only a thin shrivelled up mummy lying in a display case in a museum.

But what I thought of was that most of these great people or even the great deeds of anyone, that are seemingly a pinnacle of greatness today, will only be a faded memory tomorrow, if even that. Time just flies and we just do not realise that for all our boasts and thoughts of self-importance that soon we too will be gone and nothing much will remain. (unless it's a blog of course).

It is a very sobering image, the colossal statue of a proud king, lying broken in the boundless desert, with only the testimony of a solitary traveller left to bring word of his existence centuries later. It makes one think about what unknown tales might lie behind such colossal ruins, and how did it happen that the great empires that raised them no longer exist? It evokes images of how over the centuries a sense of mystery has slowly gathered around such ruins, a sense that perhaps somewhere in their past, as with Ozymandias, there is an undiscovered and as yet unimaginable tale.

Shakespeare (just had to mention him) wrote of the "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns." His words might well be applied to the distant past. We can try to picture it in our mind's eye, but in truth it is utterly beyond our direct comprehension, hidden beyond a horizon no explorer can ever cross. Nobody invented a time machine yet and we can only try to learn about the past from silent stony walls or fragmented papyri and the like. All we can do is collect the few clues we find scattered about, a few stones here, a few written words there and put them together to marvel at the stories they reveal. Most ancient monuments have suffered similar fates over time. They have been toppled by earthquakes or quarried for stone. Many have been desecrated by human hands. Some have been reclaimed by the grasping fingers of the jungle, buried beneath the silt and mud of wandering rivers, or engulfed by desert sands. Yet many of them still endure, visible symbols of man's greatest successes against the inexorable, corroding powers of time and nature.

PS.: this post is to go back to the beginning and to close the circle and say goodbye to a 'friend'